Chris Jackson

The game has changed for Scion. The brand is only 12 years old, but I can’t decide if that’s longer or shorter than it seems.

If you’re not a car person, you might not realize that the hot-rod Ford Focus that graced my driveway is the result of years of heartfelt struggle. You see, for many years, Ford’s brightest compact-performance stars just didn’t make it to America.

Ford’s Taurus SHO has come full-circle, in some respects. When it exploded into the lineup way back in the late 1980s, during the Taurus’ first generation, it was a no-holds-barred bad boy, a family sedan blessed with a crazy-powerful engine and a sport suspension.

Rolls-Royce has always built automobiles that somehow transcended being mere cars. Even more so in recent years, it’s easier to compare a Rolls-Royce to a second home or a yacht than to a Mercedes S-Class. But now, Rolls-Royce wants to bring things a bit closer to reality. The Phantom is still a transcendent piece of automotive excess taken to barely-imaginable extremes, but in 2012 Rolls-Royce introduced a more down-to-earth car.

The corporate myth is that Cadillac is the noble upstart in the sport-luxury market, breaking out of its traditional-luxury comfort zone to challenge BMW and Audi on the tracks that are their home turf. The reality is somewhat different, of course. The Cadillac CTS has been around for a decade now, happily giving fits to the German rear-drive sports sedans, and the Corvette-engined CTS-V has no trouble at all chasing down an M3.