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Ok, I might have to eat my words. What the Hell is going on at Ford? I understand that Mulally is trying to clean up the mess of Bill Ford and Jacques Nassar, but I don’t think this is the way.

First, Ford decides to let the car that saved them (the Taurus)  die a slow, horrible, painful death as they do not update it for nearly a decade. They dump the car on rental fleets for almost nothing as no one besides the rental companies know the model is even still around. The car was once a revolutionary design and was the best selling model in America for half of the 1990s. They simply abandon the midsize platform before coming out with a replacement for the Taurus (the 500) .

Now, they want to rebrand the three year old 500 as the Taurus beginning in 2008? Whatever brand cachet the name Taurus had is gone because of the horrible way that Ford treated the brand. Their only real hope is that enough people forgot the “Taurus is dead” stories from two months ago and don’t realize the brand didn’t stop production in 2000.

There are plenty of reasons to rebrand the 500, which is a retread of a brand name from the 50s and 60s. However, using the Taurus name to do it is simply a terrible decision. There is a reason that the best selling brands have the same names they’ve had for 20 years (Civic, Corolla, Camry, and Accord). How many domestic cars have the same name they had 20 years ago? It’s tough to constantly rebrand and consumers are easily confused.

Maybe that’s why I don’t work in Detroit?