2007 Car Reviews

Ann Arbor It was small, but it was important: sitting there on the tailgate, down beneath the release handle, was the "Santa Fe" badge. And it was crooked. more

Ann Arbor The Pontiac Solstice has been the rare ray of sunshine in General Motors' winter of discontent. The Wilmington, Delaware, plant is working three shifts and Saturdays keeping up with Kappa-car demand, now stretching beyond Pontiac and Saturn (Sky) to more

Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin Cruelly sprawling over eleven different halles, the Frankfurt auto show can sap the energy of even the most wild-eyed car geek. Last fall, at the end of my final day there, I was slogging toward the street, walking gingerly on blistered more

The development engineers at Mercedes-AMG are all dedicated to automotive excellence, yet the vehicle they can't stop talking about is the ML63. They'll tell you that it laps the old, long Nrburgring Nordschleife in eight minutes, thirty seconds-if you're bra more

The CLK63 AMG doesn't have a big light bar on its roof like the AMG-built CLK that you see pacing the Formula 1 races-in fact, it doesn't even have a roof-but it drives pretty much the same. You're making terrific time, clipping the curbs and rocketing down th more

A big engine in a mid-size car--it's been proven to make our glands swell and our mouths water at least since Pontiac stuffed a 389-cubic-inch V-8 into the 1964 Tempest. Today, the German premium brands are its most fervent practitioners, putting tarmac-peelin more

The classic tunes still rock when Carroll Shelby grooves the melody and Ford's SVT garage band hammers out the rhythm. The group's latest riff is a pair of Ford Shelby GT500s-one coupe, one convertible-capable of rattling root beer mugs on cruise night and spa more

"There are two vehicles that I know really, really well," Gary Evert says as we pitch the RDX into a downhill left-hander in Mount Tamalpais State Park north of San Francisco. "The RDX and the BMW X3." more

Volvo's S80 sedan was the company's first car to break out of the box, design-wise, but eight years on it's looking pretty dowdy. A redo for 2007 pushes the Scandinavian design thing even harder, adds the latest safety technology (big surprise there), and ups more

Forking over the new 911 Turbo, Porsche stipulated no to-the-death comparison tests or precise performance measurements. Of course we honored that request. But what would you do with the most powerful Porsche coupe ever produced in a land blessed with speed-li more

Adria International Raceway near Venice, Italy, is a safe but dull racetrack in the point-and-squirt idiom, with lots of tight corners connected by short straights and all the character of a spatula. Making matters worse, the two stretches along which I could more

Would you like your roadster with creases or curves? Now that the Saturn Sky has arrived as a sister model to the Pontiac Solstice, General Motors offers you a choice of body designs. And the choice largely does come down to design, because the Sky drives exac more

You don't need four turbos, sixteen cylinders, and sixty-four valves to go fast and be happy. All you need is too much horsepower propel-ling too little curb weight. For less than half the price of a Bugatti Veyron, Steve Saleen will sell you the street-legal more

By now, we all ought to know everything there is to know about Volkswagen's Bugatti Veyron 16.4. Bugatti has been trotting out prototypes since the 1999 Tokyo auto show. A runner finally met the world's slavering motor press in Sicily last fall, and we devoted more

The Jetta wagon is dead, so VW buyers have just one choice if they need an Ikea-invading, sports-gear-swallowing station wagon: the Passat. The redesigned model boasts improvements in all the obvious areas-more size, more power, more safety, and more style. Th more