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.

As a real-world investment, the S5 is more accomplished than the Mercedes-Benz CLK, more affordable than the BMW M6, more practical than a Porsche Cayman.

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.

If you were a car designer, you would not want the job of making the Mini bigger, any more than you’d want to add arms to the Venus de Milo. Still, against considerable odds, the Mini guys have made a great car larger, and greater still.

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.

Go ahead, park the CTS-V next to a BMW M3. The BMW looks like it should be delivering dairy products. The CTS-V’s vibe is late-night, supper-club cool. Remember when Cadillacs were laughable and clumsy? Yeah, me neither.

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.

The big-engined TT is more touring car than sports car, more for summer semesters at the Sorbonne than weekends at Willow Springs. The TT makes an exquisite design statement, but it makes it best from the right lane.