BY PATRICK BEDARD, PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOM DREW

Dearborn’s dreamboat was the MKR, a 2007 concept with an unforgettable face, warming the crowd for this near-luxury MKS.

To your list of things that will never happen, you can add one more: The hot-blooded pilotes of this staff will never rank this new Lincoln above a BMW, any BMW, in a comparison test. But the Supreme Court is not the only enclave of divided opinions; the contrarians among us think Ford has something going on here. (more…)

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BY JOHN PHILLIPS, PHOTOGRAPHY BY AARON KILEY

Antique Road Show: What would Andy Warhol drive?

This road test may be irrelevant. Which wouldn’t necessarily make it unique to the pages of C/D. This time, however, it isn’t our fault. See, Bentley is going to create only 550 Brooklands—delivering the final one toward the end of 2009—and 549 of them are already spoken for. The grand-touring coupe you see on these pages, in a color Bentley calls “Porcelain,” is the last copy for sale. Or was at the time this was written. (more…)

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BY AARON ROBINSON, PHOTOGRAPHY BY MORGAN SEGAL

Quicker than a Subaru WRX, this new Lancer model offers fun on the run.

Mitsubishi knows the name Ralliart isn’t spoken with much reverence among American gasoline punks. That should change. Mitsubishi has watched Subaru ring up healthy sales with the mid-grade WRX, which neatly slots between the 87-octane Impreza and the high-test STI. (more…)

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BY JARED GALL

The GTI moves asymptotically closer to perfection.

A select handful of cars offers a rare level of all-around excellence that sets them on a plane seemingly untouchable by their competitors. Premium branding is often part of the price of admission to this level of perfection, but the people’s car company”Volkswagen”sees no reason it can’t play here, too, granting its R32 levels of polish and balance more often associated with pricier brands. (more…)

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BY STEVE SILER, PHOTOGRAPHY BY MORGAN J. SEGAL

The quickest BMW you can get that doesn’t start with an M (until the 135i arrives, that is).

It used to be easy to write about the BMW 3-series. For the most part, we knew what we were gonna say before we ever got in the car. On the other hand, there were nuances about the character of the car that were extremely hard to put into words to convey just how good these cars feel. But we’d try, and it usually came out in the form of unbridled praise for perfect steering, elegant interior simplicity, and a brilliant ride-and-handling balance.

Maybe BMW got bored of hearing the same thing over and over again, because suddenly we had to come up with new words to describe the 3: controversially styled, technologically overwrought, and now this: quicker with the automatic. (more…)

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BY MARK GILLIES, PHOTOGRAPHY BY AARON KILEY

Hard to believe it’s a Porsche, Hard to believe it’s a sport-ute.

The Cayenne has always seemed an anomaly. On one hand, it has generated the cash that allows Porsche to continue building the sports cars we love, which is a good thing. On the other, a 5625-pound vehicle is antithetical to the creed of light weight and efficiency that Porsche has historically followed. (more…)

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BY LARRY WEBSTER, PHOTOGRAPHY BY AARON KILEY

Inner Beauty: The new-for-2008 Vette doesn’t look much different, but more power, better steering, and an available inteior upgrade address the car’s few shortcomings.

From a list of 22 new and notable features on the 2008 Corvette, item 12 caught our eye: improved steering feel. (more…)

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BY DAVE VANDERWERP

For its fourth go-round, the icon gets a can-do-no-wrong chassis and a beastly V-8.

Maybe you’ve been following the trickle of information flowing out of Munich ever since BMW showed the concept of the fourth-gen M3 at the Geneva auto show in March. (more…)

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BY LARRY WEBSTER, PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARKUS LESER

Heaven can wait.

Ferdinand Porsche would be proud of the Carrera GT. The company he founded in 1948 has produced an amazing string of sports cars that was only recently interrupted by”of all things”a truck. (more…)

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BY LARRY WEBSTER, PHOTOGRAPHY BY MORGAN J. SEGAL

After a five-year ordeal, Warren Mosler’s dream car is at last ready for prime time.

Power steering is overrated. So says Warren Mosler, the financial brainiac who’s been hoeing his own automotive row for 15 years. This past winter, after a five-year struggle, Mosler finally began delivering the street-legal, EPA-and-DOT-certified MT900S. (more…)

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