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.

To drive the 2010 Audi R8 5.2 FSI is to mind-meld with an off-world creature of magnificent grace and dramatic pace, a being that can by turns be tender and sophisticated or — once you kick the loud pedal — an unholy freakin’ animal.

This is exactly the soul-chewing, face-pulling monster you’d expect of a new Porsche Turbo Cabriolet: fitful and furious, hyperkinetic, breathtakingly responsive, with big, whopping, molten sounds on trailing throttle, the sort of aural elementalism exhibited by Icelandic volcanos.

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.

Lotus has patented a kind of easy, predictable balance and directness so even average drivers walk away from the Evora feeling like Mario Andretti. At $73,500, what you have here is the everyman’s Ferrari.

Rolls-Royce has, to my mind, just built its first real car. The Ghost is the promise of the BMW-owned Rolls-Royce fulfilled, with a car that combines the insuperable technology of the Werks with the enormous charisma and craft of British luxury.

I present to you perhaps the most fun available on four wheels: The 2010 Lotus Evora. No, not fun. Joy. Inexpressible, diamond-showering, running-naked-through-a-field-of-virgins ecstasy. Handling perfection. I am going to buy one.

In the dram-of-adrenaline-per-dollar equation, the Hyundai Genesis Coupe SE has it all over the Nissan 370Z and the Infiniti G37.

Aesthetic and athletic, with tremendous build quality and dozens of fall-in-love features, the F-150 refutes the easy dismissal of American automaking as somehow feckless and inefficient.

A $50,000 car should never be this powerful and smooth and fierce looking. The Audi S5 does not so much jolt forward as elegantly uncork, like champagne.

Here’s a car with room for four adults and one magical halfling; a car with excellent rear cargo storage and good fuel economy; a car with a sticker price within reach of every waiter, barista and entry-level clerical whipping boy in the San Fernando Valley. And it rips.

This is the Car of Sauron, a black-hearted sin of mechanical seduction, an automobile to make you eat all your pretty little words about carbon footprints and warming greenhouses. This stupendous, beautiful two-door has the power to corrupt, oh yeah, absolutely.