Never had a rust issue with my Sable but I was washing it all the time and as soon as the temp was above 32 in RI I would be out there getting the salt and such off the car. It really was still clean and almost new looking when I traded it in but not everyone takes care of their cars like that which is something so simple to do to prevent rust. I am still amazed at how many old cars I see all the time in FL that look great with no rust at all of course the paint in some cases is another story from the brutal sun.

Plenty of Porsche engineering is what you hear, which basically meant we purchased their design of a similar 60 deg engine and adapted it into the then new 2.5/3.0L family. It's not like a bunch of Germans were sharing our cafeteria in Dearborn overseeing us Americans who worked for years on the all new designs. Seemed like an intriguing idea at the time, but later proved to be equally problematic. We also sub contracted Cosworth for their innovative casting process for block and heads. Much was learned by Ford, regardless.


Both engines shared most parts, differentiated only by bore size. You only hear about durability issues with 3.0L, because Ford put far more of them on the road with Taurus/Sable and Escape/Mariner than they did Contour/Mystique 2.5L. Piston slap and bore wear wear early problems and later corrected, but even today you see many old Taurus 3.0L with well over 200K miles. I had a Contour and several Tauruses and they were among my most dependable cars ever.

Actually, at least in Michigan, the biggest issue with those cars were rust, I know my '96 completely rotted out in a couple of years after it hit 100,000 miles. It's one of those vehicles in which the mechanicals way outlived the body. I'm not sure why Ford had such a hard time nailing rust in the 80's and 90s, they seemed to fix it by the 2000s. One of the longest lived Fords I've seen recently is the original Escape and Focus (despite their initial problems). Those I4s run forever and the bodies were relatively slow to rust out, especially the Escape.

I remember that being the case for the iron block engines with less valves, definitely not the Duratecs.

History is correct but not the short life part, the Duratecs in the 90s Tauruses were pretty **** reliable I remember reading about members who had 200 even 300k miles on their Duratec Taurus and Sables.

Weren't the Duatec V6 engine designs purchased from Porsche and developed with Cosworth for the 1993 Mondeo. How much of this engine was actualy Dearborn designed?

Duratec were great performers but notorious for their short lives.