Ah, but it's unfair to judge Ford based on a car they built 17 years ago. Hmmm, OK, let's try just 10 years ago. '97? No, most of them were still crap then (certainly the Taureses and Windstars were, anyway, although a friend's Explorer did OK). 5 years ago? No, they were still building Windstars with dodgy head gaskets. The annoying thing about Ford is that they seem absolutely incapable, or unwilling, to identify and fix design errors, instead continuing to produce the same failure-prone crap for years after they become aware of the problem. That's no way to keep customers. GM, while not as bad, is still prone to having decent designs crippled by poor quality parts specified by the bean counters. Chrysler? Let's not even go there.
I bought a '97 Windstar with 47K miles. By 83K, I had its 5th tranny put in. They told me they had plastic parts in the tranny that bent under pressure. Luckily, they were all warranty fixes. Traded it in for an '04 Honda Odyssey. No problems in 60K.
I owned only Fords up until that Windstar. Never had one problem with any of the others. Now my wife won't go near a Ford dealer.