2005 Ford Taurus SE Station Wagon - Live Long and Prosper

My recent "cheap-car" search unearthed this 2005 Ford Taurus SE with a scant 52,000 miles on its ticker. Asking price $4,995. 

However, this isn't just any 2000-2005, third generation Ford Taurus - it's, be still my beating heart - a station wagon Taurus.

I don't regret getting rid of our semi-long in the tooth Tahoe last summer, but sometimes I do miss it. For instance, I have a crater in my front yard from where a tree used to be. I'm already five bags "deep" into filling it and I can see that it will take at least three if not four times more than that to fill it and grade the area properly. Maybe five times as much. My Monte Carlo can hold maybe five bags of topsoil at a time and I'm not going to load up the interior with that stuff. I recall jamming as many as twenty-bags of mulch in the Tahoe at a time. Sigh. 

Hard to tell if this is a good deal or not in this Pandemic inflated used car market. KBB.com pegs Taurus wagons of this vintage at approximately $2,000 and that's the high end of retail. Frankly I think two-grand is kind of low for something like this with just 52,000 miles on it. Something tells me sites like those haven't been updated in a while as nationwide searches on cars.com tells me this is priced fairly if not well. 

You can't say that the station wagon is dead these days as all SUV's and crossovers, what's left of minivans as well, are classified as station wagons in many if not most states. However, if we define a "station wagon" as a car-based vehicle, like this Taurus is, then we are looking at one of the last of the breed. When Ford rolled out the replacement for the Taurus in 2006 with something they called "Five Hundred", there was no wagon. Made sense since their SUV's and crossovers were already dominating sales. 

Ford made a Focus wagon through 2009 and when they pulled the plug on that, it truly was the end of the line for the car-based Ford wagons that went back to 1950.

These things were an anomaly even when they first came out. Their 1996-1999 predecessor as well seeing that by the mid-'90's minivans had taken off. Although Ford's attempts at them weren't quite what Chrysler's were. To say nothing of what Japan was doing. 

Years ago, it was amazing how "car-like" even large SUV's had become in terms of ride and handling; these days that's a given. However, back then, if you wanted a utility vehicle that really, really rode and handled like a car, you got something like this. 

 

The utility of a small-ish SUV with front-wheel-drive and a V-6? Although in this case it's Ford's dutiful although rugged, 153-horsepower "Vulcan", 3.0-liter pushrod chuffer of a V-6. Sorry, Star Trek fans, its named "Vulcan" after the Roman god of fire. Live long and prosper. 

Bonus, this one comes with some sort of handicap lift. Has to be a politically more correct to say that but that's what the ad for this called this thing. Perhaps I could use to load topsoil?  

My wife, surprisingly, was on board with at least taking this for a test drive. I, of course, managed to talk myself out of it. Although, I must admit, if it didn't have the rust issues this has, the rust spot to the right of the gas filler door is deceivably soft from the inside out, I may have had a tougher time than I did saying no. 

Still, might not be a bad buy at the end of the day. Would be ironic if I got this to replace my Monte Carlo seeing that I replaced our Taurus sedan with my Monte Carlo years ago.