MotorMouths

Fast, elegant, swimming in technical comforts and refinements, the SL is a world-class piece of machinery. It would be nice if the outside reflected the soulful beauties inside.

So the exterior styling is a sweet hot cubist mess. Evaluating a minivan on looks is like ranking Nascar drivers on their knowledge of Chaucer. The 2011 Honda Odyssey makes parenting better, and better parents will want one.

A bratty little barrel-racer of a car, with a spirit that seems to want to bite through the bit, the 1M Coupe is quick, playful, aggressive and laugh-out-loud fun to drive.

The Veloster is a kick in the pants, and it features a landslide of content for a car with a base price of $17,300. Alas, the Veloster’s bratty, hot-spit design over-promises performance.

The CTS-V Sportwagon is utterly, cosmically and seismically wrong, a filthy, shameful ogre of torque that bellows and sets alight thatched roofs as it drives by—Caliban with pushrods. It’s illicit, overpowering, sexy and a touch scary. Yet never boring.

As pleasures go, counting mpg isn’t frolicking with wood nymphs. But with the old Mazda3, people who loved the driving were tweaked by the car’s relatively poor fuel economy—pleasure versus wisdom, if you will. With SkyActiv, those clouds seem to have parted.

The 2012 TL is a fine piece of driving machinery with a nicely technical, sophisticated look. And, as always, Acura packages a lot of gear into its cars for the money.

In truth, the Equus is not the equal of the German dreadnoughts, or even the Lexus flagship. But the deficits in handling and character require a degree of connoisseurship to appreciate, and what is that compared with a savings of 25 grand or more?

Big, but not too big; attractive, but too familiar to be provocative; well-appointed, but incapable of igniting sustained envy. The Honda Accord strives not for superlatives in any one category but a portfolio of general excellence in all.

The wildly styled Acura ZDX is the Lady Gaga of new cars: out of nowhere, time-warped from the future, icy cool, hard to define, fascinating, gorgeous.

If you can’t acknowledge the genius of the Toyota Prius, you just don’t like cars, engineering, or technology. True, the Prius is not for everybody. But with the v, it’s getting there.

The metabolism of the new WRX STi feels more acute, more present, focused like a preschooler on Adderall. The steering was heavy and accurate, with tons of road-reading feedback. The ride was stiff but well-planted. The brakes are heroic. The sport seats are some of the best in Christendom.