MotorMouths

Perfect? Committed sensualists will miss some degree of adventure. Gone are the adrenaline chinchillas running up and down your spine. The 458 Italia is spooky fast without the haunting of mortality.

The McLaren 12C Spider is awesome. The 12C is the best-handling, most accessible midengine sports car of all time. And now it even sounds like it.

It’s a velvet nuke, the F12. Again Ferrari has transcended the limits of what seemed possible in a road-going GT. Again it has made touch-the-sky performance accessible to talentless bums like myself. It’s brilliant.

Hugely civilized, desperately fast, drenched in high-tech amenities and executed with the kind of spirit and joie de vivre than makes the competitive German products look positively Amish, the new Jag is now the presumptive favorite in the full-size premium sedan category.

The SLS Roadster rocks, all right. With the stability control set to maximum liberality—the Sport+ setting—it’s all pretty drama-free. Try to refrain from laughing like an insane pirate.

Make no mistake: In the 458 Italia Spider, you will be seen. Fascinating design, exquisite stick-and-rudder handling, raw power like Samson on Rogaine, the Italia is absolutely one of the two or three best sports cars in the world. Cutting the top off doesn’t make it any subtler, however.

The Aventador is ferocious, with incredible lateral grip and wonderful mechanical balance, and its design is outrageous. For a company that prizes extremity above all, I think they got this about right.

The 2011 Mercedes CL63 AMG, a tail-dancing cyclone of a luxury coupe that does everything well but does one thing so grandly that it borders on the surreal, the uncanny. It accelerates. A lot. Imagine God plays jai alai, and you’re the ball.

The McLaren MP4-12C is now the best sports car in the world, an era-defining work of technical intelligence and jet-fighter performance that will—be warned—make you look at other cars in your garage like they were lawn mowers.

The Nissan GT-R is a serious piece of machinery, a brooding masterpiece of computer-enhanced handling, sophisticated all-wheel-drive and quaint, galling force.

Bugatti built a sportier version of the Veyron—because, obviously, the Veyron was such a sissy cupcake of a car. The result? The hackneyed comparison would be to say the Super Sport looks like some kind of space ship, but if extraterrestrials exist, I seriously doubt they are this cool.

Bentley’s tag line for the Mulsanne is quite pointed: “The opposite of mass production.” All that steel, the leather and lumber? Yeah, that’ll be around forever.