I bought my taurus wagon 2 0r 3 months back its a V-6 3.0 L. When I purchased the car and drove it home i got about ten miles down the road before it started to overheat and boil the water out of the overflow resivour. I took it back to the dealer and they replaced the resivour and it seemed to fix the problem. Now 3 months later it started getting hot again and pretty much doing the same thing. The water pump was leaking water from the weep hole,So i replaced the water pump and it did not make a difference. Ever since it started acting up this past week it is really hard to start it, I have to really pump the foot feet and hold it down to get it to start. Once I finaly get it started it spits and sputters really bad and has white smoke coming from tail pipe ???? I have checked my oil for water in it and as far as i can tell there does not seem to be any. So i drove it to work this morning and it seemed to be doing ok it ran just a little on the hot side but not enough to hurt anything i dont think. Now when I left today to come home I was taking it easy and had my cruise control set. Then all the sudden it started to really loose power and speed no matter what i did, When i gave it more gas it just got worse,it was making a funny ticking maybe even a small knocking noise. I had to slow down to make a turn i was going probally around 10 to 15 mph and when i got into making my turn the car just flutterd out and died ?????????? So i pulled it off the to check it out, when i opened the hood it was steaming and hissing from the overflow tank again and maybe even from the block or heads somewhere not for sure on that one. So i let it sit there for about 30 min and then tryed to start it but all it would do is sit there and spin,all the belts are turning like there supposed to it just will not start almost as if it is not getting gas or fire to it,but i checked both and its getting both ?????? To me it kinda seems like it has no compresion but i dont really know. So my car is still sitting on the side of the highway. Can anyone give me any ideas or suggestions on what it is or what i can do to figure this out and get my car running and dependable again ??? Thank you

 

White smoke would be coolant getting into the exhaust and steaming and hissing from the overflow tank would be exhaust gases geing pumped into the cooling system. Sounds like it was overheated aty one time and took out the head gasket(s). Do you have the 3.0 OHV Vulcan engine or the 3.0 Duratec DOHC engine? I would pull the plugs to see what they look like (wet from coolant) to see which cylinder(s) may be the culprit. I would also do a pressure test for head gasket/cracked head leak.