MotorMouths

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 Jaguar XJ Supersport thus hits a sweet spot between galling luxury and serious performance. Think of it as a car that drinks Champagne and then eats the glass. Jaguar wants this car to feel edgy and racy. Refinement? Have you tried a Lexus?

I still don’t love the X3 xDrive35i (BMW’s nomenclature department needs a good beating, by the way). But this is well-struck BMW coin, a fast, techy, serious machine, worthy of the badge. That’s anything but routine.

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.

A bunch of Midwestern engineers in bad haircuts and cheap wristwatches just out-engineered every other car company on the planet. And they did it in 29 months while GM was falling apart around them. That was downright heroic. Somebody ought to make a movie about the Volt.

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.

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.

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.

The Kia Sportage is a lot of automobile for the money, to be sure. But it’s hard to overlook the vehicle’s hollowness, a kind of strangely unsupported sound to it—especially when my right foot was fully engaged. Something felt missing at the core. Not awful, but worrisome.

The most compelling arguments for the Maserati GranTurismo Convertible are its female-athlete awesomeness—"fierce," as Tyra Banks would say—and its relative rarity. Outside of the Hamptons and Greenwich, Conn., these things are going to be as unusual as unicorns.

The 2011 Chevrolet Cruze is supremely refined and quiet for a small car. But I’m sorry to say Chevrolet’s compact car of tomorrow feels more like its car of this afternoon, about 3:48 p.m. This is a car of quickly expiring market advantages.

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.