Guys, this is what a Ford engineer told me on anandtech.com during a casual conversation:
Part 1:
Taurus's have always had 'low life' transmissions. Forging the steel of quality control and quality materials that'd make it outlast things that usually fail last in the car such as...engine, frame, exc, would cost unfeasable amounts of money. Most manufactures, especially Ford, do demographics and look at statistics to see how long people keep such cars (usually 4 years, with an 8-10 year life expectency for your typical sedan) and how to build it most economically to last that long.
For example, most Ford 3.0l V6 engines have a life expectancy of ~240,000 miles. This information didn't come from me, but it doesn't really matter because this is all 'well-known' industry information.
After 240,000 miles, certain parts, especially seals and rings, have warped and are at the end of their life.
Companies like Volvo, now owned by Ford, have historically built their engines and cast their blocks to diesel-like standards, which is why they outlast many competitors.
Anyway, the transmission in your Taurus has a lifespan of 120,000-150,000 miles, which is where many other components have a rated life. Of course, depending on driving habits and such, the transmission could go out faster, or it might not have been serviced regularely. Fluid and filter changes are very, very important on FWD automatic transmissions, especially considering they usually dont have transmission line coolers which often causes them to run hot.
These days, cars are built to last longer than they were through the 90's because in the 90's demographics showed that people replace their cars every 5-6 years or at or around 80-100,000 miles. These cars in this demographic engineers were told to build them to this life expectancy so they could be sold most economically. Don't think Ford is trying to build crap as cheap as possible, because all manufactures do this, its the only way you could possibly stay in business.
Since Ford was overtaken as #2 by Toyota recently, I'll tell you why. It had nothing to do with the above, Camry's have an automatic transmission life expectancy of approximately the same as the Taurus's because they're in the same class, but you will notice the Taurus is cheaper, and the Toyota takes 22 man-hours to build and the Taurus takes 30. This explains Toyota's recent recalls, because quality control wasn't where it should have been.
Ford has many of the lowest numbers of safety and mechanical recalls in the industry, because they are built to engineers specifications very well. And being an engineer, I can't stress that we design all of our cars very well, as the last engineering-flaw recall was in 1996 when we discovered that 3.8l engines were developing cooling problems because of the cooling systems position (the 3.8 was redesigned from a RWD configuration to a FWD configuration, affecting the cooling systems effectiveness, years before these problems surfaced) which led to headgasket leaks/breakage. For owners of Sables, Tauruses and Windstars, we replaced many of these engines at our cost with correcting cooling designs. If it helps any, I didn't work their back then.
