Seattle knows Alan Mulally as the father of the Boeing 777. On Monday, he was back in town to show off his newest baby — one with four wheels instead of two wings.

You could test drive this one in the parking lot.

Now chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, Mulally is out promoting the new 2010 Ford Taurus — the latest version of a once-popular nameplate discontinued a few years ago after slumping sales, but has been revived as part of a mission to redefine the automaker.

Mulally sat down on the Labor Day holiday with bloggers and reporters, some of whom he knew from his many years at The Boeing Co., where he headed the Commercial Airplanes Division before leaving for Ford in 2006. An engineer, he spent 37 years with Boeing.

“Usually you have a rock star that’s doing a summer tour. The rock star this year is the Taurus,” Mulally said during the event at Daniel’s Broiler on Lake Union, where two shiny Taurus models were parked outside. “All of us get to choose a different city and I just had to come back to Seattle to share the latest model of the Taurus.”

Ford has planned a 100-city publicity tour for the new Taurus, and is using social media such as Twitter and Facebook to get out the message that “Ford is back,” he said. More