>> Brian Cooley: Yeah, you know it's a bad sign when your producer calls you the morning of a video shoot and says "hey, we are shooting a Taurus today, aren't we?" I don't see one in the garage. There's an Explorer. Now, this is the Taurus. This is a Taurus X as I watch folks walk by our video today, every single one who looks at this thing gets an expression like they took a snack out my cat's litter box and ate it. Yeah, it's not the most attractive thing although I don't think it looks that bad. Except for that tacky two tone body cladding panels. Anyway, leaving looks aside let's go inside and check the tech.
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>> Now inside the Taurus X things stay fairly truckish. It's a big vehicle, got a tall ceiling on it. You've got pretty large massive controls everywhere. These big old vents and big old gear shift, all say, "I am kind of truckish." Whether it is or not let's get to the electronics stuff. You'll recognize the head unit from any of the Ford we've covered in the last two years that have Nav. That's a pretty familiar Ford piece. I've always been pretty pleased with the rendering, the font clarity, it's not bad. It's a upper mid pack interface to my mind. In terms of getting around you've got a lot of very clear buttons on the screen and dedicated buttons on the left and right. It's a nice mix of whatever kind of button you like. The touch screen I find has always been very responsive; I've never had a problem with this. And getting to where I want to go both in terms of how the information is presented as well as how the buttons work when you touch them. Let's talk about the audio now, under the media button here we can go for a little tour. Here's our AM radio of course and our FM radio. No HD radio available on this vehicle. CD refers to an in dash 6 disc, you can tell by those little circles right now. I've got one loaded and five free. It's also MP3 disc compatible. DVD refers to our rear seat entertainment system which we'll get to in a minute. That options up on this car a Saurus satellite radio that would be Sirius, it's a Ford after all, and line in refers to the Aux jack down here inside the console, which has a cold vault right next to this you might imagine. But the real biggie on this car and for some reason not on our test car is Sync. That's the over arching winner here and our vehicle didn't come with it. I think it's an early production date vehicle and Sync is just entering the production line as we speak. Now, our Taurus - Taurus has the optional rear seat entertainment system. It's a big old thing, kind of spreads left to right, unlike many that are more of a concentrated thing in a center pod. Now over here on the right is the disc drive, I put a DVD in, in this case. Over here on the left are many of the controls, like the navigator for the menus as well as deciding what you want to listen to, the media button here. And then in the middle is an infrared emitter for wireless infrared headphones, which I can't seem to find, but luckily in case you can't find yours there are also as you see here little mini jacks for standard wired headphones on both sides and over here I have also got a set of RCA style auxiliary ins left, right audio and video which you can select on the media.
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>> Now, our Taurus X is an Eddie Bauer front wheel drive and that's the car that's got the same engine as all the other high trim Bauers. Three and a half liter Duratech V6, 263 horse powered 249 foot pounds, it all goes out of one transmission, a 6 speed automatic blessedly free of any paddles or gates or any other silly sports pretensions. Price wise 30,100 is the base again for a Bauer front wheel drive. Add about 340 for an iPod adapter, about 200 bucks for a Sirius, that's a pretty good deal. $1000 for the rear seat video system and another 650 for that rather nice auxiliary rear climate control.
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