First off, go find Hutch and get him to pistol-whip you a couple of times to knock some sense into you. Then come back and get a dose of reality.
Your car's running flawlessly on OEM everything after 117K miles on it? Congratulations. You have what is called in most people's books an exception to the rule. Contour's seem to come in 2 batches:
1) Those that need little if no attention
2) Prepackaged lemons on wheels
In my experience, Ford HAS been worse than most other manufacturers at playing "hide the problem" game with customers. I' won't even go into the saga of my '89 SHO and the problems it had. The ONLY thing on it that ran flawlessly for 140K miles was the Japanese-built 3.0 V-6 YAMAHA engine. I swear it just kept getting stronger and stronger the older it got. To this day I love that engine better than any other I've ever had.
Everything else around it was either made state-side, hecho en mexico or somewhere else where the QC department was either playing "slap and tickle" with each other or hitting the bong while doing QC samples. In short, the whole danm car tried to fall apart on me. Again, feel free to find the recall list for the '89 Taurus SHO. Also feel free to talk to folks that had 'em and put up with piss-poor designs on brakes, undersized clutches, horrible A/C clutch/line issues, gasket leaks around the oil pan, etc., etc.
I'll also spare you the transmission problems I had with my '93 ATX SHO. I think I went through 4 before it quit "stutter shifting" or shifting so hard that you looked in the rearview mirror every gear change just waiting to see the gears, torque converter and other internals bouncing down the road chasing after you in an angry shower of sparks...
All of these were known problems to Ford and their techs, given the massive number of complaints that I remember SHO folks pushing to their dealers. A lot of good it did us, as I recall...
Lastly, do yourself and your car a favor and change your freakin' plugs. It sounds as if you've bought into the whole Duratec/Zetec marketing thing about having the engine go 100K without any major tune-up work done. It's precisely that:
Marketing hype.
Your ignition probably sucks to hell and back if you've gone this long on OEM plugs...
If you believe the hype, though, I've got a 40HP Borla exhaust off of an '89 SHO I can sell you. I can even give you the advertisement from Borla stating that gain as well!
