Test Drive

The Hyundai Coupe, a sports car for the modern age. Get it in Gran Premio Gray, though, not arrest-me red.

A product line is mature when it has a item and a price point in every niche in its market. By that standard (and any other) Hyundai is a complete carmaker, with 10 model lines in uncountable different styles and trim levels, which cost anywhere from less than $13,000 to more than $66,000. There are econocars and mid-level family sedans, an SUV or three, and a flagship capitalist gunboat. Hyundai even has a sports car. Not a sporty car or a sporting car, but a real sports car: A pavement-shredding, two-door, rear-wheel-drive speed sled with a close-ratio 6-speed manual gearbox and a beefy clutch, a limited-slip differential, 19-inch alloys and performance tires, red Brembo brakes from Italy, and a sophisticated front-strut and multilink-rear suspension with gas shock absorbers. There’s even a torque meter on the console. Both versions, the one with the turbo four good for 274 horsepower and the one with the 348HP V-6, can howl maniacally around a racetrack. On the street, either one can make a ticket-writing cop’s day.

But the Genesis Coupe has back seats, if only for anorexic amputees, and a fixed roof. (Where is it written that a sports car must be a droptop roadster?) it’s got a respectable trunk, and the back seats fold down. Plus leather, a six-speaker stereo, automatic Xenon headlights and heating/cooling, heated seats and wing mirrors, satnav and a touchscreen. It speaks Bluetooth, iPod and Sirius. It has all the safety goodies, and a 10-year, 100,000-mile warranty. We can even order an automatic transmission, a trick 8-speed, dual-mode, torque-converter unit with shift paddles behind the steering wheel. This, more than anything else, is what makes the H-Coupe the mature and modern sports car that rounds out Hyundai’s portfolio.

Leave the office after a soul-searing week of personnel and budget crises and the 8-speed Coupe will get you home virtually on auto-pilot, with only a faint exhaust burble behind the soothing harmonies of Celtic Woman. Get up the next morning, rested and caffeinated, click the autobox into Sport and head for the hills. Now meet H-Coupe’s alter ego, the hard-core sportster. He’s muscular, he’s edgy, and he roars! Pretty soon the landscape’s a blur, your hair’s on fire and you’re bracing yourself on the large left-foot dead-pedal. The police are setting up roadblocks after complaints from the aggrieved citizenry in your wake. It’s that good.

The steering is quick, well-weighted and accurate, the brakes are progressively powerful, body lean is minimal, the chassis is super stiff, and the car behaves like a switched-on tango partner. Dig deep, and the power is instantly accessible through the automatic transmission, which clicks up and down through the gears via the paddles almost as quickly as a direct-shift, clutchless manual. Ease off, throttle back, and you’ll find that the autobox can get you 30 or more highway miles per gallon, too. Maturity again.

Back in 2009, the Hyundai Genesis was named the North American Car of the Year. Fortunately, the Genesis Coupe didn’t exist at the time or it might have confused the jury. Heavens, which one to pick? A better question might be, how are these two cars related? At $45,000, the four-door Genesis resembles a certain German sedan that costs twice as much. The small Coupe doesn’t look a bit like it. No matter; as good as the first Coupe was, this 2013 model is notably better—much more powerful and with this automatic transmission on the options sheet. All at prices that start at about one-third less than the man on the street’s average guesstimate, namely around $26,000. I do wish the air vents on the hood were functional, though.

Wouldn’t you vacate the left lane, with this in your rear-view?

Dodge Charger, 1969: Two-door hardtop with a choice of five V-8s or the 225-cubic-inch Slant Six, good for about 180 to 425 horsepower. Manual or automatic transmissions. Torsion-bar front suspension, leaf springs in the back. Overall length 17 feet, 4 inches on a 117-inch wheelbase. Weight about 3,700 pounds. The big-dog 500 Hemi cost about $4,600, which equates to $30,000 today, and sprinted from zero to 60 miles per hour in a couple ticks under six seconds. That got everyone’s attention, back in the day. So did the distinctive Coke-bottle body style, introduced a year earlier.

Dodge Charger, 2012: Four-door hardtop in eight models with engines ranging from a 3.6-liter (220 cubic-inch) six with 292 horsepower to a 470HP 6.4-liter (390 cubes) V-8. Only two transmission choices, and they’re both automatics—but one has eight speeds! Four-wheel independent suspension. Overall length 16 feet, 7 inches on a 120-inch wheelbase. Weight about 4,000 pounds. The range-topper SRT8 model starts at $42,495 and it can blitz to 60 in less than four and a half seconds. Yikes. The update of the old Coke-bottle body style still sets male synapses firing.

Everything old is new again, except so much better. Ye Olde Charger would bellow and roar and hurl itself toward the horizon; barring any urgent need to stop or negotiate a corner tighter than about 20 degrees, all was well. Heaven forbid it should hit anything. Its descendant, though, has the whole package: Acceleration, speed and handling. It arcs through bends like it’s on rails and can even zig-zag, thanks to good body control. Plus outstanding braking, steering and bump absorption. Not to mention the full cookie jar of modern safety features, from ABS to airbags, rain braking to electronic traction and stability control. This $37,000 Charger SXT Plus even has all-wheel drive, with a transfer case that disconnects the front axle when it’s not needed, to reduce wear and friction. Ye can keep ye olde Charger, I’ll take this one. It drives like a couple of big German sedans I could name.

The cabin deserves praise too. This is a muscle car, but it’s also a spacious four-passenger sedan with comforts galore. These are 300-mile seats, easy, and the satnav and computer functions can be operated by someone older than 12.

Two features especially make the Charger an exceptional interstate missile: First, the 8-speed autobox is about perfect. It helps hustle this large, heavy machine up to speed very quickly and smoothly, and then lets the engine relax. At 90 MPH, the tach shows just 2,200 RPM, which helps explain the impressive-for-size fuel economy rating of 27 MPG highway. Then, if you get boxed in, clicking over to Sport and applying a bit of pedal boosts the car around obstacles equally smoothly and quickly. However, thanks to the Charger’s other nifty highway feature, getting trapped doesn’t happen as often. Even high-rise pickup trucks vacate the left lane with alacrity (means “quickly,” for you truck owners) when they spot this silver Charger’s crosshairs grille in the mirror. Maybe it’s because lots of cops drive Chargers these days. Maybe it’s a tip of the cowboy hat/ball cap from one icon of the American road to another.

The 2012 Charger is one more home run from the resuscitated, revitalized, newly and justifiably proud Chrysler outfit. It is what American cars once were, and (some) are becoming again, namely top o’ the value heap. BTW, in case you’re wondering what “imported from Detroit” means: The Charger platform was a Mercedes-Benz hand-me-down, from back when M-B owned Chrysler. Its engine, at least the V6, comes from Mexico and the 8-speed transmission from Germany, while the entire car is built in Canada. And Chrysler’s CEO is a chain-smoking Italian guy named Sergio Marchionne, whose Fiat Group owns 58% of the company. It’s a new world out there.

Honda says the Civic Hybrid’s electric motor is more assistant than primary driver.

There’s something unusual on the latest Honda Civic Hybrid’s Monroney sticker. Its EPA fuel-economy ratings are exactly the same for both city and highway driving: 44 miles per gallon. Hybrids, at least the non-luxury ones, typically get better mileage in stop-and-go urban driving because the gas motor shuts down when the car stops, and at low speeds electricity makes a bigger contribution. So far, in town and on surface roads, tippy-toeing around in hair-shirt ECON mode, I’ve averaged 46.9 MPG (according to the Honda computer). It’s a pleasant surprise to find a car that exceeds its estimates, but it’s clear that one of the reasons such hybrids get the mileage they do is because of how we treat them. The video-game instruments and the unsettling dynamics make sure we never forget what we’re driving, and we behave accordingly. Gingerly we tip into the throttle, slowly we accelerate, gently we brake . . . always keeping an anxious eye on the econo-meter. Nobody drives an ordinary car this way.

What if we did? My hunch is that piloting, let’s say, a Chevy Cruze with equal care (at least the Eco Manual model) would achieve similar fuel stinginess. And the Cruze is the same size, a bit more comfortable, handles better, and costs three or four grand less than this $25,000 Honda.

It isn’t that the third generation of the Civic Hybrid is technologically stagnant. For 2012, its 4-cylinder internal-combustion powerplant was bumped up to 1.5 liters and the electric motor to 23 horsepower and 77 foot-pounds of torque, for combined total of 110 HP and 127 ft-lbs. Honda also switched to a lighter but more power-dense lithium-ion battery pack. At the same time, the car’s interior was stretched a few inches and got a mild face-lift, and everything seems Honda-normal, which is to say pleasant, unobtrusive, high-quality and well-screwed-together.

The over-the-road characteristics didn’t get the same upgrades. Other makers have figured out how to smooth out their gas/electric drivetrains, to reduce stop-start shuddering. Oddly, though, the Civic’s gas engine very rarely shuts down, even at stoplights, so its low-speed lurches seem to come from slack in the driveline and abrupt downshifts. (Not easy, that, with a CV transmission!) Some makers have also been able to reduce the grabbiness of their hybrids’ regenerative brakes. (Instead of being lost as heat, stopping energy is recaptured by connecting the brakes to a generator, which helps charge the battery.) At low speed, the Civic’s brakes are hard to apply smoothly; at high speed, they seem to be thinking about something else entirely. And while one of the pleasures of driving most small Hondas is their sharp steering and lively handling, these qualities are lacking in the Civic Hybrid. For so little civility, I’d expect at least 75 miles per gallon in return.

Is this still a hangover from the early hybrid days, when we thought being green meant doing penance and suffering? Maybe the better alternative is Honda’s Civic Natural Gas model, America’s only production CNG (compressed natural gas) powered car? Then again, if all you want is a sprightly little car that’s reasonably fun to drive and still efficient, there’s the everyday Civic Si, in both two- and four-door trim, batteries and electric motor not included.

Even with gasoline at $4+ a gallon, the payback on the extra cost of a gas-electric car is years in the future. Many people, though, are happy to spend more on a car in order to cut their personal output of greenhouse gasses, or to reduce America’s use of oil, or just to be on the cutting edge of automotive technology. It’s all good. I think. It’s just that, in this case, we expect more from Honda, which otherwise makes brilliant motorcycles, lawn mowers, snow blowers, outboard motors and even a jet airplane—along with all their other cars, of course.

There’s a 5-door hatchback Impreza too, for more cargo space.

The farther north one travels in New England, the more Subarus there are. In fact, along with pickup trucks, mommy minivans and senior-citizen Buicks, the Subaru wagon is a staple, especially in pea-soup green. And why not? Subies are practical, thrifty, long-lived, go-anywhere, low-maintenance vehicles; if at first they’re sometimes easy to overlook, the longer we know them, the more they impress. Does this not also describe the natives of, say, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont?

Just like those Yankees who pack their children off (sometimes as far away as Boston or New York) for a good education, Subaru has steadily toned up its models, especially the Legacy and the Outback. Horsepower, digital connectivity, plush decorating, and new safety and driver-assist technologies—it’s all there. Or at least available. Still, every model, no matter how gussied-up, has all-wheel drive and none is what you might call low-slung. Up north, the weeks between winter and summer aren’t spring, they’re mud season.

Now, for 2012, Subaru has given its least expensive car, the Impreza, a good going-over as well. Some of the improvements are subtle. The seats have been raised a bit, the dashboard lowered a bit, the base of the windshield moved forward quite a lot. The result, though, is notable: No more sitting in a bathtub. Outward visibility seems much improved, and the driver feels more in control. The cabin is light and airy, and the materials and fittings have been upgraded appropriately. Old Subie seats had flat bottoms and only adjusted fore and aft. These are nicely contoured and supportive, and can be raised or lowered. On this two-steps-up Limited model, they’re even leather-covered and heated.

The cheapest Impreza has a sticker price of $17,495 plus $750 for delivery. This one cost $22,645, to which has been added $2,069 for a power sunroof, a navigation system and all-weather floor mats. The only things on the center stack besides a storage cubby are three knobs for heating and air-conditioning and a small screen for the satnav and radio. The simplicity may leave you wondering what Subaru has skimped on, but really, it’s all there. Cruise-control and radio switches are in the steering wheel. There’s an iPod plug and Bluetooth audio. It took me a while to find the two-stage seat-heater switches because they’re between the front seats and I’d covered them up by sliding the console cover-armrest forward. The nav system is easy to use and the controls are just sensitive enough. It isn’t a long, or distracting and dangerous, reach to the touch-screen, either. You can get text messages on it, too.

The most interesting thing about this Impreza is its new 2.0-liter engine. It’s still a compact, flat four-cylinder, but it’s half a liter smaller and 22 horsepower (and 25 lbs-ft of torque) less powerful than last year’s. That’s quite a lot, and you’d think the car would suffer. But it’s lost weight, too. The Impreza barely weighs 3,000 pounds, which is unusual these days. There’s more than enough acceleration. Add responsive steering and strong brakes plus four-wheel independent suspension, and we have a comfortable AWD sedan that seats four and is more agile than some small FWD cars. In addition, the fuel economy has improved. With the optional continuously variable transmission (with paddle shifters, no less), the Impreza is now rated for 27 miles per gallon in city driving and 36 MPG on the highway. The Impreza must be one of the least-expensive, most fuel-efficient AWD cars available, but it certainly doesn’t feel like a bottom-feeder.

Overall, the Impreza gives off a strong whiff of sanity and reason. It’s as though Subaru really thought about how to make its car genuinely better instead of bigger, heavier, faster, glossier. The Impreza recently won the New England Motor Press Association’s Yankee Value Award for 2012. No surprise.

Infiniti’s all-weather, all-surface dreadnaught, the QX56. It doesn’t have to be pretty.

The most interesting thing about today’s monster sport-utility vehicles is not their size or their luxury or price, or even that they still exist, but how the best of them seem to defy the laws of physics. We wouldn’t expect something 18 feet long and weighing almost three tons to skip down the road with the agility of a ballet dancer. Well, OK—a retired, slightly overweight ballet dancer, but still. Once upon a time, only the Toyota Land Cruiser could do this. The others creaked and rocked and shuddered like old sailing ships. Then the SUV segment exploded. Today the Germans make some awesome crossover SUVs that can outgun sports cars and still clamber over rocks, but even the few remaining truck-based, body-on-frame luxury behemoths with three rows of seats can hustle along with decent grace.

But with all due respect to the Escalade and the Navigator, the Lexus LX and Mercedes-Benz’s GL-class, this Infiniti QX56 takes the prize right now. Nothing else of its heft is so light on its feet.

All these vehicles are much the same size and weight. Towing capacity (high) and fuel economy (miserable) are essentially identical. So are the sticker prices, which run from about $60,000 to $80,000. They’re all armed with V-8 engines, but the Lincoln is way down at 310 horsepower and the Benz 335, while the Caddy and the QX make 403 and 400, respectively, and generate more than 400 pounds of torque. (The GL550 and LX570 are even more money, but still down on power.)

Of all these, the Cadillac and the Infiniti are especially well matched. Prices and features line up closely—both even have 22-inch wheels—but the QX56 is much the newer vehicle, and it shows. The cabin is just plain gorgeous, laid out very well and decorated by people with good taste and a seemingly unlimited budget. Standard features include power-folding rear seats, three heating/cooling zones, Xenon lights and an electric liftgate. Various option packages include a DVD theater with two screens and wireless headsets, and everything but a gas fireplace.

Some of the most high-tech features are the ones we can’t see. These include (but are not limited to) cameras, lasers and radars that chime or beep to keep us from backing over the dog or running into the car ahead or the one alongside, or just drifting out of our lane. And then, if we ignore the warnings, they jump into action. Lane Departure Prevention and Blind Spot Warning both apply the brakes on one side to tug us back into line. Intelligent Brake Assist reduces speed before a front-end collision. Adaptive cruise control cuts the throttle when there’s traffic ahead, and speeds up again when the bottleneck clears.

Even the suspension is electronically manipulated. Sensors rush hydraulic fluid from one side to the other when the vehicle begins to lean into a corner, and pump it upright. This is where the QX gets some of its uncanny ability to defy gravity. The rest comes from the powerful engine and the adaptive, computer-controlled 7-speed transmission and transfer case that offers snow and tow modes and can be switched from automatic AWD to 4 High or 4 Low 4×4 ranges.

Everything is so smooth and so power-assisted, yet so responsive, that just one finger on the wheel and a toe on the accelerator will make the QX56 dance. A vehicle like this has considerable presence by virtue of its sheer size, but the QX has more than that. A number of my neighbors, who by now have seen about everything in my drive, were moved to comment. Such feedback is never constrained by consideration for my feelings, because they understand no pride of ownership is at stake. So I’ve heard everything from “what a beast!” to “er, hideous.” I can only reply that, once you’re inside, the ugly goes away.

The 2012 Camry: If something isn’t broken, you fix it very carefully.

“Camry” reportedly comes from the Japanese word for crown, kanmuri. You may think that it’s Lexus that is the crown of Toyota’s lineup, but no—the Camry has been America’s best-selling car for 13 of the past 14 years. Was there ever a more appropriate model name?

This 2012 edition is the seventh and newest generation of the Camry, a car that arrived in America in late 1982. Back then it was a compact. In 1991 it outgrew that classification, and it has been a midsize sedan ever since. This category is the market bull’s-eye—the bread and butter, the vanilla ice cream, the men’s size 10 shoe. Where the really big bucks are to be made. Change is scary.

Thus change is incremental and oh-so-careful. For 2012, the power of the 2.5-liter 4-cylinder engine has been bumped up by nine horses, to 178, but thanks to a dozen subtle other improvements, the combined city/highway fuel efficiency rating went up by 2MPG, to 28. Output of the optional 3.5-liter 6-cylinder stays the same, 268 horsepower, but Toyota expects its city/highway economy ratings to inch up also, to 21 and 30 miles per gallon. (The gas-electric Camry Hybrid’s MPG ratings jumped for 2012, to 43/city and 39/highway.) All gas-fed Camrys have 6-speed automatics with manual shift-ability, and the SE model’s transmission now has a faster-reacting Sport mode and shifter paddles on the steering wheel.

Outside, the car’s dimensions have stayed much the same. But inside, the distance between the accelerator pedal and the rear-seat hip point was stretched by . . . 0.6 inches. And the front seatbacks were slimmed down to provide 1.8 inches more knee room for rear-seat passengers. This “lean car” thinking was applied to the A- and B-pillars and the headliner too, which have been re-contoured to offer slightly more space, or to make the cabin feel more spacious. The driver’s chair got an extra half-inch of vertical travel. The steering wheel tilts 33 percent farther. Underneath, new alloys of aluminum, steel and structural plastics have reduced weight, yet beefed up strength and aerodynamics. The suspension has been finer-tuned. More foam and felt insulation has been added. And so on and so forth. If it ain’t broke, how do you fix it?

The fit & finish has been massaged equally assiduously. Our test Camry was a base-level LE with just $743 worth of options (the 8-way power-adjustable driver’s seat plus floor mats and a First Aid kit, a cargo net and carpeting in the trunk), which raised its sticker price to $24,003. Yet the look and feel are not far off the Lexus mark. In fact, the contours and stitching of the dashboard padding and the high-quality, user-friendly controls would be an improvement to several much more costly sedans I can think of. Although it is possible to spend a good deal more and furnish a Camry like a Web-wired McMansion, “base level” does not mean “stripped.” Save for a heating-AC system that has to be adjusted manually and an old-fashioned key that must be inserted into an ignition slot and twisted, the standard of living in this plain-vanilla LE is quite high.

So is the standard of driving. Operating the car is so transparent that to comment on it you really have to concentrate on turn-in, bump absorption, brake response, shift points, the feel of wet or dry pavement. You look for weaknesses, road noise or structural flex or any sort of coarseness, and then you realize there are almost none. It dawns on you that the Camry could hardly be more comfortable—and it has no bad manners, even way beyond the speed limit. One driver’s boring, it seems, is millions of others’ total satisfaction.

According to the International Dairy Foods Association, vanilla is the top-selling ice cream in America. “Sophisticated yet apparently simple” is how foodies describe a top-end vanilla, and they caution ice-cream makers against drifting too far from the flavor’s basic goodness. You’d think they were talking about the Camry, wouldn’t you?

The Mini Countryman ALL4 is the anti-SUV.

MINIS are the Jack Russell terriers of the auto world: small on the outside, big on the inside; cuddly and cute one minute, hair-on-fire intense the next, and always awesomely competent. I never met a Jack Russell I didn’t like, nor a Mini. But at first the ALL4 made me think that what makes the mini-Mini so endearing was working against this larger model. The ride hammered me senseless. The biscuit-tin body boomed and echoed. The clutch grabbed. The zippy steering would be overpowered by the big motor . . . but then the all-wheel drive and the clever cornering brake control kicked in. The ALL4 straightened out and shot through the bend at the top of my hill, gripping with claws instead of mere tires. My attitude began to evolve. It’s still a Jack Russell, just a bigger, tougher one.

The original British Mini debuted in 1959, and caught on like fish & chips. Its transverse engine, front-wheel drive, rubber suspension, monocoque construction and super-efficient interior (aided by shoving the wheels out to the corners) within sub-sub-compact dimensions were revolutionary. Cranked-up Cooper S versions stormed the European rally circuit. I first drove one in 1970 and was stunned by its cheerful belligerence—125 miles per hour on 10-inch wheels? By the late 1980s, the Mini had been surpassed in safety and comfort by other little cars, but it kept on selling because it was such a hoot to drive.

That Mini never made it to the USA, but we weren’t remotely ready for it anyway. In 1994, BMW bought the Rover Group and got Mini in the deal. The Bavarians created an all-new German Mini, which came to America in 2001. It’s been a smash hit.

Compared to the Smartcar, the Scion iQ and even the Fiat 500, today’s Mini no longer seems so small. The Hardtop is a foot wider and nearly two feet longer than the original. This Countryman model is 15 inches longer yet. At 13 feet 6, it’s the sport-ute of the family, yet it’s still just the length of a Honda Fit.

A Mini SUV—isn’t that an oxymoron, like giant shrimp? Only if you think a Jack Russell isn’t a real dog. The Countryman has four proper doors and a comfortable, well-bolstered bucket seat inside each one. Head, shoulder, leg and foot room is ample. The seats are divided by a unique central rail, along which cupholders are stationed. The controls are unique too; some of the switches require puzzling out. Overhead there are two sunroofs. Beneath the liftgate is space for a week’s groceries.

The ALL4 model has the Cooper S motor, a turbocharged four that sends 181 horsepower and 171 pounds of torque to a 6-speed manual gearbox. (A 6-speed, paddle-shift automatic is a $1,250 option.) BMW says the ALL4 will hit 60 miles per hour in 7.3 seconds, but it feels faster. Top speed is limited to 130. I’ve been averaging 29 miles per gallon.

Power means little without agility, and even the “big” Countryman has that to spare. BMW endowed its Minis with MacPherson struts at the front wheels and multi-link, trailing-arm rear suspension, with anti-sway bars fore and aft. Then there’s traction and skid control, electronic braking distribution, the aforementioned cornering brake control, and communicative, speed-sensitive steering. Brilliant brakes, too.

Base price of the ALL4 is $27,750. Add the Sport, Premium and Cold Weather packages, which include everything from satnav to seat heaters, backup beepers to Xenon lights, and the total becomes $31,250. Small isn’t necessarily cheap any more. But it’s really good.

I once watched a Jack Russell face down a bull elephant—12 pounds of bristling, eye-popping, stiff-legged fury snarling at five or six tons of bemused tusker. After careful consideration, the elephant decided to retreat. This came to me when I found myself comparing the ALL4 to another hot SUV, the Porsche Cayenne Turbo. Hardly in the same league, you say? You might be surprised. Like that elephant was.

The 2013 GS 350: Didn’t anyone at Lexus design see Predator?

LATE LAST NIGHT, about 200 miles into a 300-mile flog, I realized I was having one of those ecstatic automotive experiences, a drive where time and distance telescope, leaving just the sensation of boring weightlessly through the night into a tunnel carved by powerful headlamps. It was a mostly interstate romp, and even big pickups fled the left lane before me. Steering and throttle seemed to be wired to my brain; slingshotting past traffic took the merest thought, accompanied by surging revs and a distant engine snarl. The suspension might have been connected to the seat of my jeans. Brakes? Never touched them till it was time to exit.

The finish was 35 miles of empty, winding country two-lane. By then it was snowing and the tarmac was turning white. Worried? Not with all-wheel-drive grip on top of everything else.

At the house, I sat for a moment, reveling in what we’d just done, this car and I: Knocked off a long and normally arduous trip in one compressed blast, in complete comfort and safety and with no drama at all. I could have reversed out of the driveway and done it all over again.

Such periods of motoring Zen are rare reminders (in our traffic-choked, speed-repressed, cupholder-obsessed highway culture) of what driving can be. So was this a Porsche? An M-sport BMW? An Aston Martin or a Maserati? No, no—it was a Lexus, that anodyne brand favored by One Percenters who regard driving as a chore.

This is a 2013 model, a GS 350 that won’t show up in showrooms for weeks yet. On paper, it is not remarkable: a 300-horsepower V-6 and a 6-speed automatic, a posh and oh-so-tasteful cabin, stereo and computer systems better than what most of us have at home . . . that’s standard for upper-shelf sedans from Japan. But while several Acuras and Infinitis might have pulled off this midnight ride of the Valkyries, no previous Lexus cars that I am familiar with could have done it. They’d have been too squishy or too wooden.

Last year Toyota executives began to fret publicly that Lexus was a product that aroused no passion. Coincidentally, or not, Lexus had earlier unwrapped its carbon-fiber V-10 supercar, the LFA, and set some record at the Nurburgring, the merciless track in Germany where carmakers go to bash their way to way to marketing glory. It’s a long reach—about $330,000 and 250 horsepower—from the LFA down to this GS 350, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were some shared genes. (Lexus hasn’t loaned me an LFA, so I can’t say for certain.)

In town, though, the GS 350 has no better reflexes or maneuverability, or trickier features, than any other good family car. Inside, anyone who has suffered the proliferation of gadgets in luxury cars is soothed by the GS’s comparatively simple array of buttons and knobs. I can deal with this! But start it up and you’re whacked in the eyeballs by a super-high-resolution computer monitor that’s more than a foot across. It’s a split screen, and the information overload is intimidating. Then you discover the computer mouse-like controller in the center console. At first it seems way too sensitive, especially for use in a moving vehicle, but you do learn the touch. Then you gingerly begin to feel your way through the computer menus, and decide it’s not so bad after all. You can do this without a 14-year-old co-pilot. You cannot, however, shut off either half of the screen, even if you’re not using it (so you turn the brightness way down). Lexus also promises a smartphone app that will let the GS owner do a lot of Facetube stuff on this car’s “media system.” Oh, yay.

The car is now filthy with long speed-streaks of road grime. I don’t want to wash it because they remind me of last night’s brilliant dash through the elements. Mechanical perfection without soul is boring, and with the GS 350, Lexus finally offers some pepper to go along with its well-refined salt.

Dodge’s new Durango Citadel is a splendid workhorse.

YOU MAY REMEMBER the old Dodge Durango the way I do: As a clumsy, truck-based ute, just one more member of that herd of motorized dinosaurs that roamed America, doomed to extinction by an oncoming comet called the Great Financial Contraction. Yes, the old Durango crawled off to die in a tar pit somewhere, and was replaced a year ago by this, the new Durango. Like its Chrysler Group stable mate, the Jeep Grand Cherokee, the new Durango has benefited enormously from Detroit’s near-death experience, and from new direction by Italy’s Fiat.

May I say that the Durango is now what it should have been all along: a thoroughly competent workhorse that is also pleasant to operate, pleasant to be a passenger in, and even pleasant to look at. (I came out of a restaurant one night and saw it lit up under street lights, which accentuated some handsome but subtle creases in its silver-gray sheet metal.) Only the third-row seat is somewhat unpleasant, but just for adults. The very fact that it has more seats than the Grand Cherokee now puts the Durango on the car-shopping radar of families with more than 2.4 children. As well as being comfortable and surprisingly composed, the big Durango drives smaller than it is. Every time I glanced in the mirror, I was surprised to see how much vehicle was following me down the road.

There are four Durangos in Dodge’s 2012 lineup, all available with rear-wheel or all-wheel drive. So really there are eight models. They range from the SXT 4×2 ($29,000) to this Citadel AWD, which starts at $43,000. Inbetween there is a Crew model and an R/T, and of course each step up comes with more toys. The SXT can be had only with Chrysler’s Pentastar 3.6-liter V-6, rated for 290 horsepower and 260 pounds of torque. The R/T can only be had with Chrysler’s 5.7-liter V-8, with 360 horsepower and 395 pounds of twist. R/T is Dodge code for road/track, and designates a “performance” model. In this case, it means the steering, suspension and exhaust have been made more sporting somehow.

The other two Durangos, the Crew and Citadel models, can be ordered with either motor. The six-cylinder delivers 16 to 23 EPA miles per gallon, city and highway. The V-8 has a Fuel Saver feature that deactivates four of its cylinders when they’re not needed, but its efficiency is still just 14 to 20 MPG. Somewhat surprisingly, the V-6 gets hooked to a 5-speed automatic transmission, while the V-8 has a 6-speed. Functionally, one would expect the less torquey engine to enjoy the benefit of more gears, to keep it on the boil better. Dodge apparently believes that if you pay more, you should get more gears as well as more engine. Both transmissions let the driver lock out the higher gears, which can be helpful when pulling a trailer up a long grade. Dodge says the Durango can be set up to tow a 7,400-pound load.

Our test vehicle was a Citadel V-6 with most of its option boxes ticked. It had a Media Center and satnav and many other nice things. One day, I got a warning message: FCW blocked! The owner’s manual finally told me this meant that the Front Collision Warning sensor was obstructed (by snow, in this case).

From the key fobs to their drivetrains, there’s much commonality between the Durango and the Grand Cherokee. Seats, switches, many of the options, even certain trim pieces are shared. For all their genetic similarity, though, they’re different. The Durango, even the tarted-up, bucks-up Citadel, lacks Jeep’s sophisticated off-road hardware, its deluxe cabin and tauter handling. It’s the solid older brother who went to trade school, while the Grand Cherokee—better-looking, more athletic, and clearly Mom’s favorite—got the Ivy League scholarship. The Jeep is more refined; the Dodge is bigger (longer) and just as comfortable, but less expensive.

Pay no attention to the green grass; Infiniti’s G37xS sport coupe is a snowmobile.

SNOW COUNTRY is where I live, so it isn’t always good to see a sleek, low-slung, high-performance coupe hunkered in the driveway—at least when it’s under a thick blanket of the white stuff. But a peek at the shapely derriere of this machine reveals an extra letter in its nomenclature. It’s an Infiniti G37xS, and that little “x” makes all the difference. X as in X-country, meaning all-wheel drive. This is no hothouse orchid meant just for dry pavement and sunny skies.

My theory is that a car that behaves well when the conditions are favorable is automatically going to have an edge when the manure hits the impeller, nature-wise. The G37xS bears this out beautifully. I swept the white stuff off the windows and then, without firing up the snowblower, just backed out onto the street. Then the Infiniti thought it was a dogsled bringing serum to Nome—sprinting down the (snowy) straights, arcing through the (snowy) corners, climbing snowy hills without missing a beat and then descending the other side in perfect control. A winter tire at each corner helps, of course.

The G’s pretty skin and upmarket fitments are wrapped around the drivetrain of its sister ship, the Nissan 370Z, one of the world’s benchmark sports cars. Under the hood is a 3.7-liter V-6 worth 330 horsepower. The engine snarls through a pair of big-bore exhaust pipes and can drive all four wheels through a crisp seven-speed automatic transmission, which, whether it’s in normal or in Sport mode, leaves most manual gearboxes for dead. The driver can toggle it by finger, too, with paddles mounted behind the steering wheel, but the only reason for doing that is to hear the revs blip on steep downshifts. Acceleration is instantaneous and impressive, all the more so when the roads are slippery. You’d never suspect this car carries the extra weight of an AWD system.

In bluebird weather, the only way to fully appreciate the G37’s athletic abilities is to wring it out on a closed track. To do so on public roads would be to invite disaster. But a coating of snow lets us hang the tail out, power slide through corners and feel at-the-limits acceleration at much lower speeds. Just get up early, before the plows ruin everything and your neighbors are there to watch. (And, naturally, do be careful and don’t tell anyone you read it here.) On the other hand, if you’re an adult and you’ve outgrown hooning around, this lovely transmission even has a Snow setting, which cuts the power and reduces wheel spin.

When you have returned to your driveway, look around the G37 cockpit. Nice touches abound: The steering wheel tilts and telescopes, and the entire instrument binnacle moves up and down with it, so the wheel never hides the top of the speedo and tach. The driver’s seat can be snugged around one’s hips and torso, for better grip. The center stack has the usual climate and entertainment controls, but they were arranged by someone with a grasp of both logic and ergonomics. You don’t feel like you’re sitting in a laptop computer, and finding a radio station won’t raise your blood pressure, nor even distract you much from driving.

If you want four doors and proper back seats, ones that grownups can actually sit in, there’s a G37x sedan as well.

Power, handling, response, balance, looks, comfort, refinement, luxury, quality, toys—the G37xS has it all. If there are any trade-offs, like soggy handling for comfort, I can’t find them. This is a brilliant car; no one could do it better, not the Germans, not the Brits, not even the Italians. And certainly not for $42,000.

And no, not Detroit, either.

Jeep’s Grand Cherokee Overland Summit scales the all-weather, all-terrain heights.

MY FAVORITE BIT on Jeep’s Grand Cherokee is the steering wheel. It is smallish, and its rim—partly dressed in leather and, at the touch of a button, heated—is satisfyingly hefty and hand-filling.

What does this have to do with dynamic behavior, build quality, MPG, price, value or anything important? Not much. But when I climb in and grab hold, somehow this wheel conveys to me that the Grand Cherokee is a machine for drivers. It doesn’t hurt that a smaller wheel quickens the steering, while the built-in cruise-control and stereo buttons reduce how often I have to let go of it. But really it’s the feel of the thing.

Well, no. It’s really that having been much impressed by the Grand Cherokee a year ago, when it was re-engineered, I am reminded by this substantial steering wheel that in 2012 we’re in for more of the same.

Jeep claims that last year’s Grand Cherokee was the “most awarded SUV ever,” having knocked down something like 30 automotive honors. I can vouch for at least one of them, as I was on the jury: The Grand Cherokee was the official Winter Vehicle of New England for 2011. My favorite was the top-of-the-range Overland model, decked out with a luscious interior and tons of goodies and packing a Hemi.

The trouble with a smash performance, though, is how to top it next time. This year Jeep crowned its Grand Cherokee line with a new “Summit” version. It is an Overland further dressed up with chromed mesh in the grille, 20-inch forged aluminum wheels and an even more posh leather-and-wood cabin, which might just be the most luxurious in any American-brand automobile. Function-wise, the Summit gets adaptable cruise control, which sees traffic ahead and slows down by itself, and blind-spot monitors in its wing mirrors. As well, the backup camera and sensors have been augmented with Rear Cross Path Detection, eliminating any final excuse for reversing over the mailman.

The Overland was already well furnished. Jeep’s Selec-Terrain 4×4 system lets the driver tweak torque and throttle settings for sand and mud, rock, snow or “sport” by turning a dial. This also inflates the air cushions at each corner to one of five height settings. These range from normal, with just over eight inches of ground clearance, to off-road 2, which jacks the vehicle up another 2.6 inches. There’s also a “park” setting that drops the Jeep an inch and a half below normal, for loading the roof rack and getting in and out. If you have trouble with that sort of thing.

Most of us will leave Selec-Trac in “auto” mode for everyday driving. At high speed it even hunkers the Jeep down, for better control and air flow. This is particularly useful on the new $62,000, 470-horsepower SRT8 model, with its paddle-shift transmission, granite suspension and Italian-stallion brakes.

If you prefer to drive without setting your hair afire, the rest of the Grand Cherokee line comes with either a 360-horsepower V-8 or a 290-horsepower six. These two don’t feel terribly different underfoot, and you may order towing packages for each. The smaller engine can deliver more than 500 miles of range on a tank of gas, at 16 to 23 MPG. (It seems Jeep is readying a diesel powertrain, which could boost the mileage significantly.)

The entry-level Laredo 4×4 Grand Cherokee starts at $29,490; the Overland Summit at $46,595. The difference between them is largely flash and toys. All Grand Cherokees share the same hewn-from-billet structure and all-wheel independent suspension mounted on alloy subframes.

Inevitably, we have to compare this Jeep to the world’s other hallowed all-terrain deluxe ute, the Range Rover. On the basis of size and a slightly stiff ride, the comparo is between the Overland and the Range Rover Sport, not the super-cushy big-kahuna Rangie. Here, despite being $14,000 less than the Sport, the Summit comes off well. The Brit has a slight edge in refinement; off-road ability comes down to a dead heat; and the Yank gets the nod in value for dollar. The Grand Cherokee’s harvest of motoring awards will surely continue.

Smart-looking and smart over the road: Buick’s 2012 eAssist LaCrosse.

ALONG WITH warmer winters and cheaper real estate, here’s something else to get used to: smaller engines in our cars. Just five years ago, the notion of a 16-foot, two-ton deluxe sedan with four cylinders under the hood would have been preposterous. Now, though, this isn’t cheaping out, it’s being smart. Big motors use more fuel. The easiest way to make big motors smaller is to lop off a couple of cylinders—replace your V-12s and V-10s with V-8s, your V-8s with sixes, and so on. But no one wants to give up performance, so carmakers are replacing those cylinders with turbochargers or, in Buick’s case, with electricity.

It’s not just another Prius-style hybrid drivetrain. Buick calls its eAssist innovation “light electrification,” and the combination of simplicity and ingenuity is not only appealing, it’s also effective. The basic powerplant is a 2.4-liter (146 cubic inches) four-cylinder gasoline engine that sends 182 horsepower and 172 pounds of torque to the front wheels. Onto this, Buick has grafted a belt-driven, liquid-cooled, electric motor-generator and a 115-volt lithium-ion battery. The LaCrosse cruises with the fuel-sipping efficiency of its small four; for merging into traffic, passing and climbing hills, eAssist adds 15 horsepower and 79 foot-pounds of torque.

The motor-generator replaces the alternator and it not only provides the extra power, it also recharges its own battery. Other features on eAssist Buicks include regenerative braking, seamless engine stop-start plus ample current for all the accessories when the vehicle is at rest, and fuel cut-off during deceleration. The eAssist LaCrosse also has a shutter behind its grille that opens for engine cooling and closes for better aerodynamics, as needed. Even the car’s underbelly has been smoothed out with panels for improved air flow, which contributes to fuel economy.

Turbochargers reclaim energy that’s being shunted out the tailpipe; eAssist grabs energy from braking and deceleration that’s otherwise wasted. Daryl Wilson, lead engineer for the LaCrosse, explains that the regenerative braking “is done via the automatic transmission, which transmits the braking energy to the motor-generator via the serpentine belt. In most automatic transmissions, the torque converter locks up at highway speeds and releases as the unit downshifts. Not in the LaCrosse. Our torque converter remains locked through all the downshifts, and the motor-generator smooths out what otherwise would be jolting shifts.”

The LaCrosse transmission is a new 6-speed automatic that can also be shifted manually. Driving was indeed smooth, with only a few abrupt low-speed gear changes in stop-start traffic. Oddly, these diminished over time and then seemed to go away entirely. Our test car was brand-new; maybe it needed breaking-in? In any event, Buick is so confident that it has given eAssist an eight-year, 80,000-mile warranty and promises that it will soon be available on the Buick Regal as well.

The new LaCrosse has earned an EPA economy rating of 25 miles per gallon in city driving, 36 on the highway and 29 combined. Buick says this is an improvement of about 25% over the previous gas-only LaCrosse. My time in the car included a mix of highway and in-town driving at an average (according to the onboard computer) of 30.6 miles per hour and 26.9 MPG. While no one would confuse it with a BMW 750Li or a Mercedes S550, the LaCrosse felt adequately powerful for a full-size premium sedan, and more luxurious than Cadillac’s steroidal CTS-V. With a sticker price of $38,175, it was also far, far less expensive.

Impressive as the engineering and value may be, Buick’s efforts will be futile if no one wants to drive the car. Well, I want to drive it, and I was sorry to see it go. The LaCrosse is serenely quiet and comfortable at speed, composed and capable on bad pavement, and very spacious inside. It is also an unusually handsome, even sophisticated design, especially for Detroit. If this is the lower-energy, lower-carbon, make-do future of the automobile, we can have no complaints.

Doesn’t this look like a Grand Cherokee? It’s Jeep’s 2012 Compass.

THE RECENT YEARS of turmoil in Detroit have benefited no domestic automaker more than Chrysler, victim of mismanagement under three different regimes: its own, then Daimler and finally Cerberus Capital, the living embodiment of how to make a small fortune (start with a large one). Then an unlikely savior rode in from the East, and his name is Sergio.

Sergio Marchionne, that is, the CEO of Fiat and, since 2009, of Chrysler too. He and his team made Fiat profitable inside two years and then darned if they didn’t do the same for Chrysler, which was able to pay off its government loans in May 2011. One reason for Fiat’s interest in Chrysler, of which it now owns a good chunk, is its Jeep division. As a brand, Jeep resonates strongly and positively among generations of Europeans. The first ones to arrive were driven ashore in Sicily in 1943. Today, Jeep’s Grand Cherokee has as much cachet over there as Britain’s vaunted Range Rover.

Chrysler’s new management got to work on selling other, less-expensive Jeeps in Europe too—like this one, the Compass. That meant sharpening up the way it drove and upgrading both its interior and its styling, while keeping an eye on pricing. Then Jeep “exported” those improvements back to the US and applied them to its US-spec Compass for the 2011 model year. The result has been a boom in sales, here and over there. The Compass is no longer an unlovable Jeep wannabe.

The improvements continued for 2012. The Compass got a face-lift from the Grand Cherokee, not to mention illuminated cupholders. Under the hood resides a four-cylinder gas engine that generates 158 horsepower and 141 pounds of torque, or the optional 172-horsepower, 168-ft-lbs World engine, a more sophisticated and efficient inline four. The entry-model Compass Sport has a five-speed manual gearbox. The mid-level Latitude and top-line Limited models come with a second-gen continuously variable automatic transmission that a) doesn’t feel like it’s from a lawn tractor, and b) makes the most of what each engine has to offer. Even the lesser motor lets the Compass cruise comfortably on the highway.

Every Jeep should have some modicum of off-road chops, and the new-and-improved Compass got an upgrade here too. The Compass can still be had with just front-wheel drive, but virtually everyone chooses among the two levels of four-wheel-drive capability and an array of options. These top out with the Freedom Drive II Off-Road Package, which rides an inch higher for better ground clearance and has (among other items) a low gear range in its transaxle. Every 4×4 Compass now has a lockable center coupling between the two axles that should let it power through deep snow or mud. There is even a new All-Weather Capability package that includes all-terrain tires, tow hooks (for rescuing other vehicles, of course) and an engine-block heater. One result of all this is that the Compass is now “Trail Rated.” Good as this sounds, it is a benchmark that Jeep invented for itself—it isn’t handed out by some independent jury. However, Jeep won’t play too fast and loose here because it can’t risk the Internet-promulgated scorn of enthusiasts worldwide. Furthermore, the company cautions that even a Compass with the full box of chocolates is meant only for “moderate” off-roading.

It hardly matters. The Compass is now a better-than-decent all-weather commuter and road car. Furthermore, in a segment crowded with excellent mid-size soft-roaders from Japan and Korea, the Compass holds its own in comfort, capability, equipment and price/value. The nicely furnished Latitude shown here, with the smaller engine and a grand’s worth of options, stickers for just $25,350.

Chrysler is rocking and rolling as it has not since Detroit’s glory days of the 1960s, and the media and engineering staffers I know enthuse about Fiat’s input and effect. “These people really care about cars!” one of them told me last year. What a concept!

Like all Hyundais, the Accent provides more for less.

We’ve gotten so accustomed to heaping praise upon new vehicles from Korea (from Hyundai and Kia, that is) that when one that’s only ordinary shows up, we don’t quite know what to do with it. But after a few days in the saddle, it became clear. Yes, the car spoke to me.

First, it’s ordinary mostly because there’s just not much under the hood. These days, 138 horsepower and 123 pounds of torque just doesn’t ring the bell, much less chirp the tires. This 5-door-model Accent is no “hot hatch,” nor does Hyundai offer a sporty upgrade. The standard manual gearbox has six speeds (plus reverse, of course) and it’s smooth to shift, but it’s not a fine instrument upon which to play stirring music. (A 6-speed automatic is an available option.) Balancing engine revs against the clutch take-up requires a bit of finesse, to make the most of what torque can be found. Hustling the car down a twisty back road means working to keep the motor on the boil, while the rear end hops a bit in bumpy corners and any attempt to find semi-serious lateral grip is hampered by the flinty low-rolling-resistance tires. A steady 75 knots down the interstate is very do-able and not uncomfortable, but a tad buzzy.

Enough with the negatives. Here’s where the Accent can shine: Do you have a college student who excels? Dean’s list every semester, leads the debate team and the Latin club and stays on campus over holidays to volunteer at the shelter? Makes you so proud that you want to reward her with a car? A BMW 3-Series, you say? Are you daft? She can buy her own when she gets out of law school. In the meantime, the Accent hatchback is your—and her—car.

For openers, it’s less than $15,000, which eases your pain. It’s also capable of 40 miles per gallon of unleaded, which is easier on her budget. It’s front-wheel-drive, which is always preferable for novices. (If her school is in the snow belt, spring for winter tires, too. They’ll be cheap, because these wheels are just 14 or 16 inches in diameter.) Power mirrors and windows and air-conditioning are standard. The gearbox will force her to learn to manage a clutch, which is a status symbol among kids and teaches a driver a lot about friction, slip and road feel.

It’s slow enough that if she loans it to her boyfriend, he’s unlikely to get in trouble with it. It’s small enough to make campus parking easier, but big enough to carry a dorm room’s worth of clothes, stuffed animals and bedding back and forth each year, plus a desk lamp and a stereo. (Fold down those rears seats; and put a ski rack on the roof for her.) Despite its chipmunk footprint, Hyundai says that the 5-door Accent’s cargo volume rates it a Compact, not a Subcompact car.

Finally, it’s almost handsome, inside and out. A few crisp folds and a neatly tapering roof line make the hatchback much prettier than the Accent sedan. The cabin is not low-rent as the price might indicate, either, as it’s done up in harmonious shapes and colors (gray and black) and made of plastics that look and feel at least mid-grade. Front-seaters get the best of it, with even elbow room to spare and comfortable, supportive seats. The sound system has six speakers and can be had with satellite radio and a hands-free Bluetooth phone, plus iPod and USB ports. The Premium Package also has audio and cruise controls built into the steering wheel. Still, decked out like a shopping-mall Christmas tree, the Accent lists for only $15,795. This may not be Hyundai’s most exciting product, but it hews true to the company’s goal of providing more for less.

Seriously, does this look like a chick car to you?

Fiat’s brave new foray into our car market has been here just long enough now that everybody has seen one and formed an opinion. Right, it’s tiny outside and surprisingly big inside, and it’s even easier to park than a Mini (visibility is better), and it zips around like an all-weather skateboard and seems to have been screwed together on a day when Italy’s labor unions were in a good mood. So here’s the real question: Is the Fiat 500 a chick car?

Sure, the Gucci version with the mother-of-pearl interior, the one that Jennifer Lopez emerges from on TV like Venus rising from her bath, is a chick car. A hyper-mega-über-chick car. The one in my driveway, though, is painted an unusual shade of bronze (one woman called it “rust”) and has a clutch and a five-speed manual gearbox. Glaringly obvious inside the racy little wheels are bright-red brake calipers that resemble the anchors on hot Porsches. There’s even a “Sport” button on the dash, which I reflexively push although it doesn’t seem to do anything. This little buzzer is pretty sporty with or without a button. People unfailingly notice the car—pulling away from an intersection with a raspy bark that sounds almost air-cooled, or hurtling past on the interstate at some godawful speed—and then they notice the silver-haired AARP member behind the wheel, and smile. Or snicker?

To help settle the question, I polled a dozen of my peers in the petrolhead media, promising anonymity. By and large, the answer was (paraphrasing here): “Of course it’s a chick car, you moron.” The youngest guy in the group, however—and remember, Fiat aimed the 500 at him—replied “No, I think it’s something more than that. Like what the Mini is. It’s too funky and cool.” (One of the other No votes came from a guy who qualified his response with, “But then I drove a Miata.”)

Virtually no one rates the Mini a chick car; virtually everyone thinks the New Beetle is a chick car. And I say this Fiat is a tougher call. First, it’s delightful to drive. Oops, “delightful” is kind of a chick word, isn’t it? And it comes from one of the most macho-yet-refined cultures on earth, Italy, and a company that also owns three ultimate “guy” brands, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari and Maserati. It’s front-wheel-drive and agile, so six inches of wet snow didn’t pen it up, even on summer tires. The front seats are comfortable on a four-hour run, and the back seats are not. There’s room inside the hatch for groceries. There’s no bud vase.

Bumps throw the car around—it’s too small not to react—but this just makes us pay attention and really drive. So does the slightly lazy throttle and clutch, and the reactive steering. Pay attention! And when you do, fun happens! If driving means guiding your luxomobile between the white lines while you think about your next-quarter earnings, the Fiat 500 is not for you. Maybe it should be. Wake up!

Perhaps it’s appropriate for a marque that disappeared from America almost 30 years ago, but driving Fiat’s latest 500 puts me in mind of cars long gone. Specifically, Bill Hefner’s ice-blue Volkswagen Beetle. In 1967, when we were in high school, he let me drive it. It was awesome. Compared to my parents’ cars (a red Oldsmobile Rocket 88 station wagon with an automatic and a green-over-white Rambler American with three-on-the-tree), it skittered around like a water beetle and it could be driven flat-out without dire consequences. It showed me that driving could be rewarding, a sport, an end in itself. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

If this Fiat—incomparably more modern than that ancient vee-dub or Fiat’s old 500 from that era—has the same impact on some kid today, terrific. And if it’s a chick car, it’s for chicks I like. As for me, I want the hotted-up 160-horsepower Abarth model, in gleaming, wicked black. Welcome back to America, paisan.

VW’s 2012 Passat neatly blends American and German style, comfort, drivability, and even price.

VW is out to conquer the world. Executives have said publicly that they intend to knock Toyota or GM (or whoever it may be at the time) off the throne by 2018. At last count, they were well ahead of schedule, but world domination requires a plan. China may be the largest up-and-coming auto market, but no carmaker can be king without big sales in the USA. Thus the first shot fired in this war was last year’s US-edition Jetta, designed—some say dumbed down—to appeal to American drivers: It grew and got a softer ride, while its sticker dropped by a few dollars.

VW’s next offering for us is the Jetta’s big brother, this new Passat, “designed and engineered in Germany, but built in America [in a new plant in Tennessee] for Americans.” The old Passat is still available in the rest of the world; ours is bigger, cushier and again cheaper—sort of. VW says we can own a fine mid-size German sedan for only twenty grand. It is true that the entry-level Passat, mellifluously labeled the “S PZEV” and equipped pretty well, lists for $19,995, but most of us will forgo its five-speed manual gearbox in favor of the six-speed automatic and the Appearance Package. Then we’re at twenty-three grand, and we’ve still got a somewhat harsh-sounding five-cylinder engine that puts out 170 horsepower and 171 pounds-feet of torque.

But wait, there’s more—in all, a dozen variations on the American Passat for 2012. The two premium Passats, one with a fuel-efficient four-cylinder diesel and the other with a 280-horsepower gas V-6, both start at $32,000-plus. The mid-range SEL model shown here costs about $28,400, which includes satnav and satradio plus seat heaters. But I’m underwhelmed by the five-cylinder engine, so I’d buy the first model with the bigger motor, which is called the SE V6 and goes for just a few hundred more. Not a bad price for a powerful, roomy, four-seat, front-wheel-drive Germanic car, if a far cry from “only twenty grand.”

My beef might not be the five-cylinder engine so much as the throttle. It takes a fair prod to get the SEL moving. Clicking the transmission to Sport clears up the initial hesitation, but then we’re plagued by more-abrupt shifting. Six-cylinder Passats have VW’s “automated manual transmission”—the DSG, or direct-shift gearbox. This is a very trick unit with two electrically operated clutches, one that engages the next gear before the other disengages the current gear. The DSG can be shifted manually or left on its own, like an automatic. Gear changes are more pronounced, but since these are real gears, the DSG transfers power more positively. Passats with this high-power, high-efficiency drivetrain accelerate more than just briskly.

Four hundred miles in the five-cylinder SEL averaging 59 miles per hour used up a gallon of gas every 31.9 miles. The modest torque keeps the transmission busy when passing, but at speed the Passat is smooth, stable and confidence-inspiring.

Its cabin is spacious and elegant, and it looks and feels more costly than it is. The switches and controls feel European, and everything is easy to figure out and use. There is no computer joystick. On the outside, the styling is so middle-of-the-road as to be bland, but the car is handsome in a discreet way, especially in silver metallic. (It looks like the love child of a Chevy Malibu and the previous Passat.) The steering and brakes are reassuringly responsive and the ride is astonishing—potholes are felt only as distant disturbances and don’t disrupt the car at all. It’s hard to say without direct comparison, but the American Passat seems both more taut and more engaging to drive than the American Jetta. I am sure it will sell.

VW isn’t just Volkswagen, the People’s Car, any more. On the passenger-car side, the VW group includes Bugatti, Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, SEAT and Skoda, and is poised to swallow up Porsche next. Sounds like they’ve already conquered the world.

Is this not today’s station wagon? The 2012 Toyota Highlander.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING experiment: Gather up a BMW sport ute, a Toyota Highlander and a Lincoln Navigator. Put a hundred miles on each, over a couple of days, in that order, and then go directly into the next one. The initial half-hour behind the wheel is almost shocking, and there is no clearer lesson in the effect of a vehicle’s chassis, steering and suspension. At first, the BMW is almost too much work to drive. But afterward, the Toyota feels like it’s had over-ripe bananas somehow mooshed into its steering box, springs and shock absorbers. And then in the Navigator (ironic name) you wonder how anyone can stay between the white lines. But we learn to compensate, and before long each vehicle feels “normal.”

We humans are infinitely adaptable, sure. More to the point, most of us are too busy telephoning, texting, checking our email, drinking coffee, shaving, applying makeup or yelling at the kids to think about the actual act of driving. Handling? Response? Control? Nah, we care about how our car makes us look, how convenient its features might be, and how long we can put off any maintenance. When it comes to consciously guiding a vehicle across broken pavement or ice, through puddles and snow, or down the interstate at speed in a crosswind, we just want a big thing around us that sits up high on the road. Preferably with all-wheel drive. Then we feel safe.

By now you can probably tell that the Toyota Highlander is a boring vehicle and I’m strapped for something clever or enthusiastic to say about it. In truth, the Highlander—roomy, comfortable, reasonably priced, built in Indiana—sells exceedingly well. It is the reincarnation of the family station wagon of the 1960s and ‘70s, and exactly the sort of useful and reliable, yet bland automotive appliance that has lofted Toyota to a podium position in global car making. Unlike the station wagons of yore, however, it has all-wheel drive and all sorts of passive safety features, and it does sit up high(er). Furthermore, some Highlanders are armed with a 270-horsepower V-6 that is light-years more efficient than the lazy, smog-spewing V-8s of the Plymouth Gran Fury and Oldsmobile 88 wagons of my youth. (Note that both brands are now extinct.) And despite my snide crack about bananas in the suspension and steering, it also handles far better than those dinosaurs did, thanks to a world of improvement that includes suspending all four wheels independently and adding stabilizer bars fore and aft, not to mention modern shock absorbers and tires and anti-spin technology and more. As a sedan-based, unit-body “crossover” sport-ute, the Highlander is also far more solid than its creaky body-on-frame wagon ancestors. Given routine care, it will last far longer than we can stand to look at it.

For a modern-day vehicle, however, some Highlanders lag behind the state of the art. Our $36,000 SE model has only five speeds in its automatic transmission, and to achieve ignition one must insert a metal key into a slot on the dash and then twist it. There’s no pocket transmitter that activates a start button. It is remarkable how “vintage” and inconvenient this feels. The electrically operated lift gate with a separate glass hatch makes up for it, I suppose—but then what’s with this postage-stamp-size rearview screen? To be fair, 6-speed and even continuously variable transmissions are available in more upscale Highlanders. Toyota even offers two gas-electric hybrid Highlanders; the top-of-the-range Limited starts at about $48,000, and is equipped with all mod cons.

Buried in the fine print on the Toyota web site I came across this line, which could be put on a T-shirt as the company’s mission statement: “Toyota strives to build vehicles to match customer interest.” Most consumers want road-going appliances; most consumers like Toyotas.

Don’t let the off-road setting fool you; the BMW X3’s natural habitat is the highway.

THE 3-SERIES in all its permutations—sedan, coupe, wagon, ragtop, hot rod, rear-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, gas and diesel—is BMW’s star. It’s the car that every office drudge in the world (those still employed) covets and the target for every other maker when it rolls out a smaller car with premium pretensions. Odd then that the X3, the sport-ute of the 3 family, got so little attention from BMW. At least until now.

For years we carped about the baby Bimmer SUV’s rocky ride and its lackluster styling and interior. But it was selling well, so what did we know? Then, for 2011, BMW woke up and gave the X3 a tasteful makeover, inside and out, and began to apply some of the goodies that the cars were getting. (The iDrive computer system may not qualify as a “goodie” to everyone, but BMW has made it less inscrutable to those of us who are over the age of 14.) If you’re already a BMW sedan driver, the X3’s stubby shifter lever, with its odd shape and buttons, counterintuitive movements and robotic response, will be familiar. If not, you’ll have to teach yourself that pushing the lever ahead engages reverse, and to go forward you pull it backward. To “Park” you don’t move the lever at all—just thumb the switch on top. One of the biggest changes for the X3 is an 8-speed automatic transmission, which helps improve fuel economy on the highway to about 25 MPG. The downside, at least in the 28i model, is that with so many cogs to choose from, its computer brain sometimes makes the transmission hunt around for the best one. Fortunately, shifting is smooth enough that this isn’t terribly bothersome.

Every BMW automatic has a Sport setting, which sharpens the response and, here, locks out the top two gears. You can engage them in Sport mode, but you must do it manually, by pulling the gear lever backward. To go forward. You can get used to this—but not to the automatic door locks, which require two pulls to open. That’s annoying.

Don’t expect the X3, without a low range in its transmission or much ground clearance, to scramble over rocks and through mud like a Jeep or a Land Rover. In fact, with pavement tires it’s hard-pressed to climb a steep, grassy hillside. But BMW’s claim to fame has always been handling prowess on pavement. This was well and truly baked into its first “truck,” the 1999 X5, and then applied less successfully to the smaller X3, which debuted in 2004. Although it’s now nearly as large as the original X5—and no lightweight, either—the newly refined ride finally makes the X3 a pleasure to drive. (Equal weight distribution over both axles plus fine seats and a stiff and creak-free structure don’t hurt, either.)

BMW’s other hallmark has always been its powerplants, 4-, 6-, 8- and 12-cylinder wonders that spin up like ball-bearing yo-yos and produce a lot of power for their size. The American X3 comes with one of two 3-litre (180 cubic inches) inline sixes. The 28i motor makes 240 horsepower and 221 pounds of torque. The 35i is the same engine turbocharged to 330 horsepower and 300 pounds of torque. The difference in acceleration is astonishing, but the 28i motor provides plenty of power too. In fact it feels quicker than it really is, thanks to a hair-trigger throttle. Pulling away from a stop, there’s a bit of pedal travel when nothing happens and then wham!—you’re bolting through the intersection like a Tasered rabbit.

BMWs have never been cheap, but for people who enjoy driving they usually deliver lots of satisfaction per mile. An X3 28i starts at $37,000 and the 35i about $5,000 more. However, to get a taste of the luxury that BMW can also deliver, figure on spending another five to ten grand on top of that. At least now the X3 feels like a “proper” Bimmer.

The 2012 SRX has confident moves; now it needs a top-shelf cabin.

A FEW DAYS and many miles in Cadillac’s 2012 SRX crossover wagon led to some bifurcated opinions. A long and boring ride on a traffic-choked interstate left me grumpy about the stiff ride and noisy, abrupt downshifts when coping with the rolling roadblocks who won’t vacate the left lane. A few days later, however, returning via mostly secondary roads winding through mountain country, the SRX magically morphed into a willing accomplice. The secure ride provided great control as well as pothole absorption, and always had the vehicle pointing in the right direction at the right attitude. And this time the V-6 engine’s 308 horsepower and the 6-speed automatic transmission meshed well. As did the full-time all-wheel drive and the limited-slip differential, which may have helped in the occasional stretch of pavement covered in wet leaves or early snow.

There’s a lot here for the enthusiast to like, even beyond the new, much more flexible motor and the no-nonsense suspension: The driver’s chair is positively Germanic in its range of movements and supportive comfort, and not only the steering wheel but also the pedals are adjustable. The variable-rate steering is firm and direct; the brakes need some commitment from the driver, and then they respond with serious bite. The wipers are fitted with proper blades—fully rubberized, long and clingy—and the windshield and headlamp washers are effective. (Like high-capacity defrosting, this is a big deal in regions that feature cold temperatures and/or plentiful precipitation.) I am a big fan of xenon headlamps, too—especially if I’m behind them, not looking into them—and these swivel with the front wheels to peer around corners. The satnav is easy to program and the spoken directions are clear. Outward visibility is excellent. There are obstacle sensors in the front bumper as well as the rear, and a backup camera. Switches in the wheel let us fiddle with the stereo and the cruise control without reaching for the dashboard. The power tailgate and the sliding cargo rack in the back are welcome, and on an icy morning the steering-wheel heater is a bonus. Even the electronic key got some thought—matte black and sleek, it doesn’t cause an unsightly pocket bulge.

The captive audience, I mean passengers, are also well treated. Space is ample for four adults, the seats are comfy for all, and the split zones offer personal heat and air conditioning. A $1,395 entertainment option provides dual DVD screens for the people in the back.

Like Cadillac’s vaunted sister ships, the CTS sedan and wagon, the SRX was styled with a razor blade, a straightedge and plenty of jaw-jutting attitude. Back in ’04, when the SRX debuted, the look was meant to underscore that Cadillac no longer wished to be the Official Car of America’s Elderly. Since then, the styling has gotten even edgier (and more confident) as Cadillac smoothed out the mechanical flaws in earlier versions of the SRX. Now, to everyone’s surprise, it has climbed to second in sales in the luxury crossover market, behind only the best-selling Lexus, the RX. This is especially remarkable if we think about how different these two vehicles are. The Lexus is genuinely luxurious and oozes quality, but it drives like, well, like Cadillacs used to back in the land-yacht era—while the aggressive SRX behaves more like a BMW sport-ute. It still needs a makeover inside, though. No one in Detroit, even at Cadillac, yet “gets” luxury interiors. The shapes and lines here are generally decent, but the materials and feel are much more Walmart than Bang & Olufsen. Class up the cabin, and the SRX should do well even in decadent Europe—especially if it can keep its price edge. At about $48,000, an upmarket AWD SRX is five to ten grand less than a comparable Lexus or BMW. And then let’s talk about a dual-clutch, 8-speed transmission and a high-efficiency, high-torque diesel option. The best should always get better!

Hyundai’s $65,000 Equus is a luxury car for the new reality.

ANOTHER LUXURY automobile? In this day and age? Given the gestation period of any new car model, Hyundai has been planning this since well before the fat lady sang, but it hardly matters—the Equus is a different sort of luxobarge, a cut-rate wonder that attacks the Europeans right where they are most vulnerable: Price. Still think a top-end Benz, BMW or Audi costs about $65,000? Wrong. They’re now a hundred grand or so, out the showroom door; sixty-five thou is the price of this car—a Hyundai, no less. Yet about all it lacks is the cachet of a three-pointed star or a blue-and-white roundel.

Even at “only” $65,000 (for the Ultimate model; the slightly less opulent Signature version costs $58,000), Equus will never sell in big numbers; that’s a given. But it doesn’t have to. It marks Korea, Inc.’s attainment of another value level in car-making and it puts a hole below the waterline of the establishment: Six-figure price tags are so pre-Recession. We’ve seen this coming since Hyundai rolled out its $40,000 Genesis V-8 sedan a couple of years ago, in what was then new high ground for Korea.

From any angle, the Equus says Capitalist Gunboat in big, block capitals. Hyundai borrowed freely from the big dogs—the row of headlamp LEDs from Audi, BMW’s muscular haunches and iDrive-style computer joystick, the shark-fin roof antenna, Mercedes-Benz’s dreadnought grille, the layout of the Lexus center stack. Equus even shares Rolls-Royce’s Lexicon-brand sound system (but with 17 speakers). The Hyundai trumps the standard German V-8s with 429 horsepower, and it feeds that power through a creamy-smooth 8-speed automatic transmission and on into a self-adjusting air suspension. The driver’s seat moves a dozen ways and massages your back. The car has nine airbags, a camera that peers around the front bumper at slow speeds, parking elves fore and aft, and radar-guided smart cruise control. There are all manner of electronic guardian angels, including lane-departure warning; all that’s missing are blind-spot scanners in the wing mirrors.

The owner’s manual can be downloaded onto an iPad. Dealers pick up the car at your home, for service appointments, and leave a loaner behind. The trunk is deep enough to create an echo, and it opens and closes electrically. The front windows shed water, for heaven’s sake.

Did I say that this car, all 17 feet and two and one-quarter tons of it, costs only half to two-thirds as much as the other big gunboats?

The Equus does not, however, share the ultimate poise and driving dynamics of the Germans or the rakish personality of Maserati’s Quattroporte sedan. Passengers love its posh cabin and its serene and wondrously hushed ride, but the driver needs more than just great straight-line stability—the Equus’s steering is rubbery-numb and the wheel wants to return to center badly enough that it seems to fight corners. The accelerator feels disconnected, as if a computer is analyzing the pedal input before giving the go-ahead. The anti-skid control cuts in too abruptly.

There’s a simple remedy for these driving quirks. (And it’s not that the Equus isn’t up to the job so much as that the S-Class, 7-Series and A8 are so all-around smashingly good. Did you know that they cost up to twice as much?) The remedy is to present someone else in the family with a chauffeur’s cap and the Equus key, and then take up lordly residence in First Class: The two rear seats in the Ultimate model are adjustable, heated and cooled, blessed with window shades, individual climate controls and stretch-out legroom, and separated by a console with a built-in refrigerator. In addition there are cup holders, reading lamps and vanity mirrors, as well as a media center with a DVD movie player. The right-hand chaise longue is even equipped with a fold-out leg rest and a massager.

The Equus is a cut-price limousine, the stately Rolls-Royce to Hyundai’s more driver-oriented, equally bargain-priced Bentley, the Genesis sedan.