2007 Ford Taurus SEL

Back in the early 1990s, I had a summer job with the federal government that required me to travel around fixing computers at various locations.

One of the perks of the job was that I was given use of a vehicle, a brand spanking new 1990 Ford Taurus. This was the first generation of the Taurus and at the time it was pretty exotic looking compared to my own car that that time - a 1979 Mercury Zephyr.

It had a very space-age appearance with it's rounded, almost bubble-like contours.

As I drove the Taurus around that summer, I was quite impressed with how smooth and quiet the car was. Definitely made tooling around that summer a very comfortable affair.

Over the years the Taurus slowly lost its iconic bubble shape and morphed into looking like all the other cars on the road. Eventually, in March 2019, Ford built the last Taurus.

This particular car was the fourth generation of the Taurus and had a 3-liter V6 engine.

The interesting thing about this car was that it came directly from a local car dealer to the junkyard. It did seem that the dealer did try to sell the car first since a sales sticker detailing the features and a price for the car was still stuck on the windshield.

In fact, the car looked to be in pretty good shape overall, other than the rather large hole in the middle of the hood.  It almost looked like it had a rather unfortunate encounter with a forklift.

It could have happened at the junkyard, but my suspicion is that it may have happened at the dealer.

Since the car was over 10 years old, it may have been too expensive to fix, hastening its trip to the junkyard.

The car started its life in the Toronto area and being sold at auction about a year later with 27,000 kilometers on the odometer. 

It spent the remainder of its life puttering around a town that was located on the shore of Lake Huron before making the hour-long trip inland to the car dealer.

A few months later, it rests here.