[Shotimes] Plastic Hood Poll

[Donald Mallinson]

Ron,

My point is that the evidence we have, and we have a lot, 
including everything posted in the latest poll, is that the 
plastic hood was on every true plus SHO, and it got on a FEW 
non-plus SHO's.  As you pointed out Ron, several of the 
other known SHO Plus unique features are not mentioned in 
that infamous salesman's flyer or the showroom brochure, so 
the fact that it is not mentioned is of no importance.  The 
picture doesn't show the hood so we don't know if it was on 
the car in the picture or not.

Those of us that have been to every convention, and have 
paid attention to the 91's (since I was looking for a Mocha 
Plus since about 1992) have noticed that by far, MOST 
non-plus production in 1991 got the steel hood.

The number of 90's that got the hood is miniscule and I 
attribute that to a pre-production "test" of some sort?  or 
maybe they had the plastic hoods ready and some got used as 
inventory of the SHO specific steel hoods dropped to zero 
one time...all speculation, but the hard evidence is that 
the plastic hood was used for the Plus cars.  The new car 
lots of the time had the plastic hood on ONLY the plus cars 
in the dealerships I went to.  The plastic hoods on non-plus 
cars from the factory are rare.

As to why the hood was made, we just don't know.  And I am 
not sure if we will ever find the person responsible, but I 
will continue to look.  Speculation is all we have since my 
best guess (for racing hologation) did not pan out, we can 
guess that maybe they planned a change for the entire run, 
but the extra cost and low production quantity, maybe, 
forced Ford to put the hood on as a plus feature only.  We 
know that the plastic companion spoiler had production 
problems, and that is why quite a few true Plus SHO's got 
the hood, but not the spoiler.

About the brochure print date; Even though it says March, 
chances are the photo's and copy were finalized long before 
that.  This is a common problem with brochures.  They are 
usually put together when the very first pre-production 
prototypes are built.  Final option packages, colors etc are 
almost never in their final stages at this point, even 
today, but it was really bad back in the 60's when cars 
changed a lot every year.  These brochures have to be on the 
dealers shelves before the cars hit the showrooms, that 
means they are written, photographed and sent to the 
printers several months before Job 1 on the production line.

I am just trying to prevent yet another rumor from starting 
about these cars (the Plus models).  WE know pretty much 
what happened with them and when.

BTW, the PLUS designation is official on the order forms, 
and it was NOT unique to the SHO.  only the 212A package 
number at the time was unique to the SHO.  There were Plus 
packges for the regular Taurus the same year.

Don Mallinson
SHO Club

Ron Porter wrote:
> I see the point that Scott was making, which I believe is basically that the
> hood was not made purely as something that was to go on the Plus cars, but
> it ended up being used on the Plus cars (in addition to many others, many
> well before the Plus models were produced). When some '90s came with the
> hood, those were cars that were built almost a year before the Plus cars
> rolled off the line (well, 9-10 months, anyway).