I've always enjoyed working on my vehicles. I worked as a mechanic early in my adulthood, and that furthered my abilities, but I was always a tinkerer.

True to what I tend to do, I became obsessed with the Ford Taurus SHO.

SHO stands for Super High Output, and the Taurus SHO was a hybrid between a family car and a high-performance vehicle akin to the Corvette or Mustang.

Ford built a new motor in a partnership with Yamaha. It was a high-performance engine slated to be put in a new model that was supposed to compete with the Corvette directly.

That project never materialized, but Ford still had all of these brand new high-performance engines without a home so they decided to shoehorn them into the ultimate family car, the Ford Taurus, and call it the Taurus SHO.

Many of them came with a manual transmission--something high-performance fans liked.

They released the first of the 1st generation models in 1989. I bought one of the second-generation SHOs in 2007. It was a 1994 model, and I loved it!

The intake manifold was configured to open the intake butterflies wider the more vacuum they saw. The harder you pressed on the gas pedal, the wider the butterflies opened to allow more air into the combustion chamber. Air + fuel + spark is the formula for an internal combustion engine.

What this meant in practical terms (to me at least) was that when I would "get into" the gas pedal, the engine would let out this specific-to-the-SHO intake noise/growl that was music to my ears. It sang like an actual high-performance vehicle.

I would take the highway as often as I could just to hear that sweet intake sound as I accelerated up the on-ramp!