Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- It's amazing what the introduction of one great car can do to change an automaker's fortunes.

The decline and discontinuation of such a car explains a lot too.

Production of Ford Motor Co.'s Taurus sedan is ending this week in Atlanta after a 20-year run and 7 million units built. It's the kind of automotive home run Ford, which reported a $5.8 billion third-quarter net loss this week, would dearly love to repeat.

On the day Taurus appeared in late December 1985, Ford wasn't winning much acclaim for quality or originality. Those who see cycles in history will recognize the parallels between the Ford of that day and now, as the automaker tries to win shoppers who seem more interested in Japanese, South Korean and European makes. Ford is on track to lose $8 billion or more this year, mirroring horrendous losses in the early 1980s.

When the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord still were relative newcomers to the U.S., the 1986 Ford Taurus stunned the automotive world with so-called jellybean styling, aerodynamic curves that challenged the boxy, sharp-edged fenders and hoods of its contemporaries, such as the Chevrolet Caprice Classic and Ford's own LTD.

Lee Iacocca, then the chairman of Chrysler Corp., ridiculed the new model, calling it a ``flying potato.'' He was bitter, of course, having been fired from Ford in the late 1970s. As odd as the Taurus looked initially, it gained admirers steadily and its numbers grew.

Believers Needed

``Similar to today, the world back then didn't think Ford knew how to build a car people wanted to buy,'' said Allan Gilmour, a former Ford vice chairman and a vice president of finance in that era. The base model first sold for $9,645, equipped with a 2.5-liter, four-cylinder engine and a front- wheel-drive, three-speed automatic transmission.

Taurus's picture soon appeared on the cover of news magazines and business publications, a sign that American manufacturing could compete with the best from Asia. Suddenly jaded consumers believed they had permission to consider buying any model with Ford's blue oval logo.

Using the same basic design at Taurus, Ford also produced 1.9 million Sable models under the Mercury brand, operating a second production plant in Chicago until 2004.

With the Audi 5000 as visual inspiration, Ford designers had created a popular utilitarian sedan that stood out from almost everything on the road. Most controversial was the car's front, which omitted a conventional grille. Instead, the design called for a corporate logo on a disc that appeared to float against a solid backdrop.

Best-Seller

Ford executives initially were so worried about Taurus's lack of a grille, they manufactured some anyway just in case and were prepared to change the design, if necessary. In its first full year, Taurus sold 263,450 units, contributing to net income of $3.29 billion, a big rebound from the company's $1.1 billion loss just five years earlier. Peak sales came in 1992 at 409,751.

I owned a grey 1990 Taurus that served me well, so I tried to bestow it on my teenage daughter in 1994, thinking it a reasonable first car for a beginning driver. No dice. A slave to fashion, she demanded a Jeep or some other sport-utility vehicle -- then a hot new category that young people favored.

Taurus competed against Camry and Accord for best-selling car in the U.S. several times, winning the title five straight years through 1996.

Bad Makeover

But a 1996 redesign, its third, proved disastrous. The car looked smaller, even though Ford said it wasn't. Drivers turned their noses up at Ford's new take on rounded styling, which featured lots of oval-shaped instruments and equipment -- too many ovals, really -- inside and out.

``The people who worked on the project desperately tried to match Toyota's Camry on quality,'' said Mary Walton, whose 1997 book ``Car'' chronicled the 1996 Taurus. ``I was there and know how hard they worked.''

After 2000, Ford sold increasing numbers of the Taurus to rental-car fleets at deep discounts, generating meager profits, if any. Ford's Explorer sport-utility vehicle in the meantime had become a highly-profitable proxy for the family sedan.

Ford's Five Hundred sedan and Freestyle crossover wagon were meant to replace Taurus and Sable and get the automaker back into the family sedan business as the Explorer aged and sales fell amid competition and rising fuel prices. The numbers so far are disappointing. Five Hundred sales through the first nine months of the year were 68,082, down 19 percent. Taurus sales were 147,996, down 8.5 percent from a year earlier.

One More No. 1

Nothing would help the company more now than a new model that performs as well as the early Taurus. Designing a hit car is as tricky and uncertain as creating a hit movie -- only more expensive.

Ford has been selling its Fusion, a midsize sedan, since 2005 and is bringing out new models such as the Edge, a so-called crossover vehicle that incorporates features of SUVs and cars.

Camry and Accord have endured as strong sellers, while Five Hundred, Fusion, Freestyle strive for attention and sales.

Ford will have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars per model in marketing and advertising, as it did for Taurus and Sable, just to make customers aware. It will be worth every penny if another breakthrough like the Taurus is born.

(Doron Levin is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Doron Levin in Southfield, Michigan at dlevin5@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 26, 2006 00:08 EDT