MotorMouths

The Acura ILX strikes me as a second-marriage car. This is a roundly sensible, tolerably attractive little luxer with very decent build quality, diverting performance and a score or more of easy-to-use digital amenities. It also has a substantial pedigree for safety and reliability.

The RDX blandly appeals. It might not be the car I once loved, but then, as my wife frequently observes, it’s not all about me. The less and more of the new RDX adds up to more of what a lot of people want. I’m just not one of them.

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.

The TSX Sport Wagon is reasonably handsome, unreasonably well equipped and I’m willing to give extra points to any company that brings forward an entertaining, useful sport wagon as an alternative to a high-hipped crossover.

The latest and, I assert, the greatest wagon/coupe/crossover is the Acura ZDX, a ferociously dynamic, red-in-tooth-and-claw styling exercise. If only this major-league body didn’t have a minor-league chassis to go with it.

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.

On the scale of oxymorons, “luxury hatch” is right up there with “hilarious colonoscopy,” but somehow the 2012 Audi A7 makes it work, and makes it, dare I say, a revelation.

So, to summarize: The A8 L W12 Exclusive is faster than hell, with every imaginable convenience, lonely and formal to the point of being ceremonial.

People who are shopping the Allroad are looking for a refined and affordable sport wagon with more soft-road and muddy-bloody bandwidth. I can’t say it delivers the full measure of that, exactly. In the Allroad’s case, that new-car smell is compromise.

So the TT isn’t the purest expression of the sports coupe ever. No big surprise, nor disappointment either. It’s also a little pricy. But, remember, you’re not paying for performance; you’re paying for design

The V8-powered GT is 2.5 tons of fun: a big, beautiful and immensely willing grand touring car with superb suspension, stupendous brakes, and a sport-biased all-wheel-drive system clawing at the pavement with 21-inch tires. And it will pass just about anything on the road.

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.