No Reserve: 1989 Ford Taurus SHO 5-Speed for sale on BaT Auctions - ending March 31 (Lot #69,334) | Bring a Trailer 31,000 miles. I don't know much about the Yamaha 6 cyl.
Pretty neat car to drive. The stock Taurus wad decent handling car - the SHO was about 2 notches above that. The engine is pretty great too. somewhat high revver, but good torque as well across the band. I didn't own one, but courtesy of a Ford Drive program, I got the use of one for free, for a weekend - a '93 model with automatic.
IMO the Manual Trans SHO's were great cars to drive, The V6 Liked to rev and you could take advantage of that with the manual trans. Not so much with the automatic trans though. Dated a girl that owned a manual trans SHO and it was very fun car to drive, we even auto crossed it a couple times (it needed a better driver than me to show if off though) I was at 1st exited to hear about the 2nd gen version with the small V8, then I drove one and besides the fact that I did not like the new styling as much, they made a very short stroke engine without a lot of low end torque, and then saddled it with only an automatic transaxle. But this 1st gen version would be a very fun car to own, these and the supercharged GM W-Bodies are about the only FWD cars I actually enjoyed driving.
These cars were awesome. One of the first "Ford gets it" type cars that made me turn my head away from solely GM cars. You definitely want the 5 speed though, Jeff is right about the automatics being dogs. They weren't awful or terrible in auto form, they just didn't come alive the way a 5 speed did because of the programmed shift points. It's nothing modifications or tuning couldn't fix. The '92-95 cars were an improvement on the '89-91 models, but this is still a great example to own and drive. The next gen '96+ with the v8 wasn't the same. On paper it should have worked, but it just didn't due to the automatic and the overly small v8 that didn't like to rev. These were also one of those best kept secret\sleeper performance cars in the mid-late '90s.
I have always wanted a SHO with a 5 speed. The Mom of a kid I played baseball with in middle school had a red one. I lusted after that car!
