Ford Taurus SHO Review

Cars.com experts walk you through the Ford Taurus SHO and its important new features.

Ford Taurus SHO Review Hi I'm Kelsey Mays for cars.com. We’re at the Chicago auto show checking out Ford’s new Taurus SHO. This is a high performance version of Ford’s flagship sedan which was redesigned in time for last month’s Detroit auto show. That’s covered separately in the cars.com video with Editor Mike Hanley. The SHO is a slipper performance car version of the Taurus. But its price tag puts it into the territory of performance VA sedans like the Pontiac G8GXP and the Dodge charger SRT8. You’ll have to wait for likely lack of performance compared to those cars against Ford Superior cabin quality and definitely superior G8s mileage to see if the SHO works for you. SHO stands for Super High Output performance so we’ll get right to the important stuff. Rather than using a V8, Ford went with a 3.5 Liter V6. It’s got twin-turbos direct injection on and a lot of other tricks to make 365 horsepower. That’s one for everyday of the year except on leap year. It’s an estimated power rating but it is a little bit under the G8GXP and the Charger SRT8, both of those have more than 400 horsepower. I guess that would be everyday of the year on a planet that was really slow. It wraps all that power through a 6-speed automatic transmission with pedal shifters and all-wheel-drive. All-wheel-drive is optional on the regular Taurus. That’s pretty much it. You can’t really see a lot of show to use on the outside there's just a spoiler on the back, twin exhaust pipes, a few badges here and there and a different looking grill but overall besides that and the larger wheel is 19 or 20-inch alloys are available. It’s kind of hard to figure out that this is really a show car versus a regular Taurus. Ford is targeting the highway gas mileage for the Taurus SHO to be about 25 miles per gallon. That’s pretty good for a car with this kind of power. It’s much better than those V8 competitors, not that far off your regular non-turbo Taurus which has about 263 horsepower. Throw in things like a more responsive steering system in the sport team suspension with the larger wheels and this car should prove a lot more agile in performance situations than the regular Taurus. There's a performance package in fact that adds things like a tweak final drag ratio for quicker acceleration and even more responsive steering if you really want that type of performance edge out of your SHO. One of the cooler thing that package includes is a different mode for the electronics stability system which Ford calls their advance track. It basically dials back the threshold force so that you can get a little bit of wheel spin. A little bit of fish tailing out if you want. It’s kind of nice. It’s something you don’t see unless you get up to performance cars. Inside the cabin looks pretty reasonable pretty close to the regular Taurus’. There are more metallic trims here and there. There's obviously a SHO badge over on the passenger side. The seats have suede inserts in the center but really they don’t feel any more bolstered than the regular Taurus’ seats. So if you take this car on a winding road, it might allow you to slip around a little bit too much. The Taurus SHO goes on sale this summer for 38 grand roughly including the destination charge. That puts it right in the crosshairs of those performance rivals. For additional information on this car or any other, go to cars.com and our blog, kicking tires.