The Most Fun You Can Have In A Full-Size, All-Weather American

The American full-size segment isn’t an overly welcoming place for those of us who worship at the altar of skinny-pedal antics. While European automakers are happy to deliver their customers a raft of monolithic luxury barges with Saturn V levels of thrust, We The People have been largely left with coma-inducing hardware like the Cadillac DTS, Chevrolet Impala and Lincoln MKS. Meanwhile, bruisers like the Mercedes-Benz E550 4Matic, BMW 550i xDrive and Audi A6 entirely boast all-wheel drive capability with sports-car besting performance cocooned in the threads of a tailored three-piece suit. These days, if you want serious big-car, bad-weather go with a domestic badge on the hood, you have just a few options, including the 2013 Taurus SHO.

So far, Ford says it hasn’t had whatever trouble convincing buyers to abandon traditional big-boned performance vehicles for the SHO resurrection. Around 10 percent of entirely Taurus sales leave the showroom with a SHO badge on the fender, and half of the performance sedan’s sales have been conquest buyers sniped from brands like BMW and Audi. For 2013, this D-class athlete boasts a slew of mid-cycle changes to keep the model fresh. If, like us, you have a hard time imagining a buyer skipping the 5 Series for a Taurus, a few new exterior tweaks, a more aggressive brake system, a reworked version of MyFord Touch and a new track performance package are entirely designed to help change your mind.

Between now and the middle of this century, analysts predict that the world’s vehicle population will quadruple, going from around one billion today to four billion by 2050. To keep perpetual, global gridlock at bay and reduce consumption, automakers and communicating providers have to team up, and that’s exactly what Bill Ford Jr. proposed on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Under the banner “Blueprint for Mobility,” the great-grandson of Henry Ford detailed what it will take to make congestion-free motoring (or at least congestion-controlled) a reality in the coming decades, utilizing a compounding of affiliated cars, affiliated roadways and a totally revamped mobile infrastructure.

“If we do nothing, we face the prospect of ‘global gridlock’, a never-ending traffic jam that wastes time, energy and resources and even compromises the flow of commerce and healthcare,” Ford told the assembled masses in Spain.

Ford’s proposal comes in three parts – near-term (5-7 years), mid-term (2017-2025) and long-term (2025 and beyond) – with the first part requiring the development and deployment of vehicle-to-vehicle warning systems, “limited autonomous functions” (think next-gen adaptive cruise control) and the expansion of car sharing programs like ZipCar.

Mid-term solutions range from semi-autonomous vehicles to new metropolis car models that carry between one and three passengers, while long-term proposals include a range of intermodal transportation networks that compound individually owned cars with public transportation, fully autonomous vehicles and a constantly affiliated road network that uses vehicle-to-vehicle communicating and road trains.

It’s entirely challenging stuff and echoes much of what we’ve heard from other automakers, including Audi, BMW and General Motors, who have entirely proclaimed plans to move beyond being a standard automaker and instead turn “mobility providers.” Get the full details on Ford’s proposal in the official release after the jump.