MotorMouths

With all its high-g grip, straight-line zoom, and denture-launching brakes, the 458 is a new benchmark for megadollar vomit inducers. The 458 has performance that race cars could once only dream of.

The Aventador is pretty much what the Murciélago was: enormous, loud, stupidly impractical, and obscenely flamboyant. It’s also ­better at being so.

It exists mainly as an objet d’art for its owner and a one-car circus parade for the fawning public. It is perhaps the apogee of internal-combustion performance, the final word before the dawning dictatorship of electric pods. It is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sports.

he Aventador is pretty much what the old car was: enormous, loud, stupidly impractical, and obscenely flamboyant. It’s also ­better at being so, but we’re not here to ­persuade you. Those of  you who want it and can afford it already know  who you are.

The special edition Boxster Spyder is suckered to the road and unflinchingly neutral, with none of the bounding and steering washout that haunts all rear-engine 911s. This is the best-handling stock Porsche, period.

The new 2011 XJ flagship has the flamboyant lines of an Italian torpedo, the driving manners of a German autobahn cruiser, and is tuned for Buckingham Palace fleet duty.

With the Turbo, Hyundai recognizes and celebrates the Veloster as a sporty car, not a sports car. If that sounds like damnation with faint praise, it’s not.

The 621-hp Bentley Continental Supersports sounds wonderfully flatulent and looks slightly scary. At any moment you expect it to unfold into a giant robot and start bench-pressing 747s.

The 2012 Nissan R35 GT-R (12MY M/C) represents improvement by half-degrees. Message to owners of older GT-Rs: You have nothing to be ashamed of. Your vehicle is still a stunning, ballistic Corvette killer, even next to the new machine.

The C-Max is dynamically proficient and rewarding to drive, and certainly more so than the cars with which it competes most directly. If you’re going to take on a giant like the Prius in its own backyard, it’s good to at least be quick on your feet, and the C-Max certainly is.

The M5 is a quantifiably superior car to its predecessor. Some things can’t be quantified, however. We’re all for more-efficient, more-powerful torque monsters, but perhaps not at the expense of personality.

When it’s not being tossed around, the Mercedes-Benz SLS impersonates a luxury liner, with decent visibility, an imperturbable desire to track straight, and an ardent fuel appetite.