Gadgetory

a couple of people have asked me is that a crossover oh it's not but kind of biggish isn't it in fact it's Ford's remaining large sedan now with the death of my dear beloved Crown Vic behind us let's roll excel in the 2013 Ford Taurus limited check detect good grief the Taurus is big it's got these massive lines all around it also has to be big in another way in the entire class of full-size sedans take a look at the 2014 Impala the newly redesigned Toyota Avalon and the heavily revives Chrysler 300 the Taurus can no longer be a car that you ride in only when you rent or visit your grandparents and this generation certainly goes way beyond that now getting in the Taurus is like sliding into the tub not wet but really high and enveloping all around you man look at this big high beltline up here an even higher brow line across the top of the dash these sort of projections here also exude mass the whole the whole dash T does over here Ford keeps sort of improving the responsiveness and to some degree the cleanliness of the buttons in that interface but they still have a ways to go these are an issue these four zones around here are like what Audi does except they're hard to get to look how deep and tight the bezel is around here if you want to get to one of those you've really got to arc your wrist and use your fingertip let's get specific over here on the media side you've got all the major sources notice that was kind of a slow transition that's also something they have to address AM and FM with HD radio sirius satellite radio a single disc slot here for optical down here I've got one of my two USB ports being used and that's where my iPod lives and then you've got to scroll down the menu you can find even more here there's my droid setup for bluetooth streaming I have SD card playback as well and some AV RCA input jacks I want to see one thing Ford does really well HD radio is really great on a Ford head unit everything comes in and nothing you don't want my indicator that I have a second HD channel if I hit tune I end up going to dot - for this station if I want to tag that song so I can have it in iTunes later to prompt me to buy it there's the button right there that's sending a tag to my iPod and you have an EZ HD radio on/off up there which you're going to use when you're in fringe coverage areas because going between HD and analog is really annoying in the current version of sync you get text messages flashed on the screen you can have them read to you or read them on said screen and there's a bunch of canned replies available navigations up here not much has changed it's via SD card so you can add it later by going to the dealer and spending 800 bucks for the card and sticking it in there I like that flexibility I like what they've done for traffic this is something all automakers struggle with how do you place the red yellow or green ink if you will on the road to show its traffic status Ford's done it with kind of glowing shoulders around the traffic area leaving them free to use a consistent color for the actual roadway itself our car has adaptive cruise control so you end up with a button over here that you won't always have that's called gap and that's where when you turn on the adaptive cruise you see four bars in front that little car indicator there and that's where you set the distance you're going to follow it's a relative thing I'm sure in the manual it tells you roughly how many feet those are that also ties in to what we have here which is a forward collision alert system if you're driving along and you're closing too fast on a car in front of you this little thing right here you see that that's a projector it looks kind of like a tail light it projects right up on the windshield right there like a very simple head-up display that puts a big old tail light right in your face it's coming off your dash and of course it beeps and blares at you what it doesn't do though is apply the brakes it does however pre-charge them so they really grab when you do wake up and get on them I thought about this and it's almost not so much as collision avoidance technology as liability transfer technology because once this thing beeps and your brakes are supercharged you jump on them and this car just stops instead of hitting the car in front of you you're going to get rear-ended but in most states that's their fault now our car limited has what's considered the base engine on the tour I these days and it's an upgraded modernized v6 no turbo charging on that EcoBoost stuff it's simply a very modern v6 sitting sidesaddle of course front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive we have the former the numbers 288 horsepower 254 foot-pounds of torque the car weighs about four thousand thirty pounds on a chunky gets up to 60 in 6.9 seconds not bad by any stretch mpg is 1929 now the more interesting and brand-new engine option this big old Taurus is a little turbocharged EcoBoost four-cylinder yeah believe it or not it would have about 17 percent less horsepower but twelve percent better mpg by my calculations that $1,000 option that's right it cost more for the smaller engine you'd earn back in about three years so it's a reasonable alternative to consider and I'd like to get my hands on one Sue's we do or report back now the first thing to remember about driving a Taurus is that it's a Taurus if you get too obsessed with skid pad adhesion and slalom times you missed the point of this car it's a big roomy semi luxurious four-door sedan what I find they've done really well on this vehicle is that I've got a comfortable ride road input but not too much you could never call this car numb and it's handling and at the same time maintains the comfort while still having responsive handling when you get into a turn onto a smaller road where you press it not to its limits because this car isn't about its limits but press it to enjoy the road some degree does a very nice blending of comfort and responsiveness very good a less successful blending is of this really wonderful motor there's great smooth Torquay linear power there it sounds great revving up but it gets bogged down in a transmission and a bunch of chips and engine control computers that just seem to always be figuring out what they want to do in a committee meeting common to a lot of cars it's too bad in this car because there is such a great v6 up front okay let's price this big boy 33:9 for a limited v6 front-wheel drive on top of that you're gonna want to add package 301 a it's a good value for twenty seven hundred bucks you get heated and cooled front seats the bliss blind spot cross traffic alert on your but Sony premium audio and the push-button start which I could live without but it's in there now seven ninety five on top of that buys you that little tiny SD card but that unlocks a pretty darn good navigation system with great traffic display 1195 gets you the adaptive cruise control with the forward collision alert all in done up seen that style you're a tick below 40,000 that's not a bad value for a car that I think drives very nicely and has got good - great tech all the way through it the problem is a Taurus has no cachet you got to buy this car because you like it not because they do you