Cars aren’t the pieces of garbage they once were, which helps. Engines easily make it past 150,000 miles and are incredibly tolerant of neglect. Body structures are strong, and you’re surrounded by airbags, your bacon is saved by ABS and stability control, and rust is nowhere near as common as it once was.

Great, but our flabby ‘Murkin backsides still squash the life out of seat foam, cretins in parking lots still assault unblemished bodywork with door dings (even when you’ve parked at the very farthest reaches of the lot), and every car has its own set of reliability foibles and wear items.

So while the age of our fleet can be taken to mean that cars have gotten significantly better, it may just mean that fewer people can cough up the monthlies for a new car. Hell, I bought my cars used, and I’m still paying one of them off. I’ll be done soon, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be turning around and replacing both my paid-for cars. It’d be nice, I’m tired of stuff wearing out, or just going completely haywire (a hidden dark side of increasingly sophisticated networked electronics), and generally, a change would be welcome. But the extra money I’d sink into a four-wheeled depreciation and liability machine would give me a little breathing room paying down my credit card, which gets used as an occasional high-interest bridge loan between paychecks. And even though it’s frustrating when things break, it’s more economical to keep fixing the old clunker.

Enough pity for me. Well, a little more would be okay, I’ll wallow for a while. My point is that while the fact that our cars are generally older than they’ve ever been, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we love the cars of 2002 the best. It just means that we’re still working for 2002 money, while expenses have been shot out of a funhouse cannon at the horizon of complete ridiculousness.

I will not buy a Nissan GT-R.

Headed for the hot LZ of a Nissan showroom, even an unlimited supply of funds, I’d roll out in a 2012 Nissan Versa.

I have my reasons.

A Story: The 2012 Nissan GT-R was mostly idling through a municipal park in first gear. This is what it feels like to throttle your fighter jet back to the edge of aerodynamic stall; any slower and you risk falling out of the sky. This is no way to treat one of the world’s most affordable supercars. An $89,350 Nissan being called “affordable” may seem absurd, but what I felt from behind the wheel was a purposeful machine with a 530 hp twin-turbo V6 and a 196 mph top speed. I was doing about 19, tops.

Finally joining a public road, I’d had enough. Down went the acclerator pedal, up went the RPM, and some milliseconds later came the boost. Ah, the boost. Twin turbochargers are indeed so lovely. That’s the cleaned up version of my utterance, which was something like “Holy $#%@!”

The ferocity of the GT-R is astounding. The vents in the hood look like the fangs of a snake for a good reason, the 2012 Nissan GT-R has bite. It’s an amazing piece of engineering, with a rear transaxle (that only clunks and bumps a little) and all-wheel drive to put the wickedness down to the pavement. Hot damn, is the GT-R impressive. It is also $90,000. And it’s just one car.

A car that is occasionally terrifying enough when it’s 72 and sunny, forget it in the schphincter-clenching conditions of winter. Also, the GT-R is so damn good that most everyone who clambers aboard will run out of talent far quicker than the GT-R exhausts its supply of tricks. Most of you would get cocky and hurt yourselves. Many auto journalists already have with cars like this.

So that’s why I’d get a Versa, instead.

It returns better fuel economy. LOTS better fuel economy, like 30 mpg city and 38 mpg highway. It’s impressively spacious, with a back seat capable of holding two fully-grown North American Automotive Bufoons without causing factional conflict. It rides and drives okay. There are no clanks from its CVT (eat that, GT-R). It’s also inexpensive. When you see the interior, you’ll understand that I mean cheap.

Still, I felt far more at home making the 1.6 liter four cylinder moan and the 185/65 tires on 15″ wheels scream. I wasn’t afraid I was going to get a hard physics lesson at my own hand. By the way, those are the smallest tires I’ve seen on a car in a long time. In the old days, you’d find that size under 3,200 lb European station wagons and on four cylinder Fox-body Mustangs. Now, it helps the sub-2,500 pound Versa cling to the road. That’s a lot of tire for a car that doesn’t weigh too much. Not that the suspension is set up to do anything with it, even with the potential for amusement that a good front-strut, rear torsion-beam layout can deliver. What it all adds up to, though, is a car that’s tough to hurt yourself with. There’s 107 hp and most will have a CVT, not the stuff of dynamic dreams. That’s good, you won’t even bother trying to get in trouble with the Versa, and there’s not enough power to really do anything with, anyway.

The entire Versa sedan is all-new for 2012, and so what if the plastics make the Interior Fondling Society recoil in horror? Just like the benign chassis, you can live with it all day, every day, for years. Most importantly, the Versa doesn’t consume all of your 90 grand. Instead, you’ve still got roughly 75K to play with. If you really cheap out, you’ll only spend $10,990 without sacrificing air conditioning or a stereo. The change in your pocket will be enough to buy a used race car of one sort or another, with a trailer and a truck to haul it all. It’s a simpler solution to just drive the GT-R to the track, race it, and then go home, you say? Good luck with that. It’ll be a long walk when Mr. Leadfoot buries his car in your right rear quarter panel, busting up your race car and daily driver at the same time. It’s not that you’re going to be able to afford a car that’s as technologically advanced or refined as the 2012 GT-R for track duty, but if you’re serious about actually getting out there and competing, the GT-R is probably not the right car, anyway.

Only you can answer if it’s smart to purchase a single thing for $90,000 that will sorta do what you want to do, or a collection of things suited to the task for the same amount of money. Playing Rat Fink on the road will surely favor the dynamic capabilities of the GT-R, though the Versa can tickle your “slow car fast” pleasure center rather than making you a menacing missile with too much car and not enough skill.

Your choice.

[nggallery id=2012-nissan-gtr ]
 

The price of the 2012 Hyundai Elantra is guaranteed to not chafe your arse, but the way it leaves your wallet fat is  going to upset your sciatic nerve. It’s a good kind of pain, every twinge a reminder of the value Hyundai puts into its automobiles. There are other ways to flatten out your billfold, anyway. Saving on an automobile leaves spending money free for cigarillos, single malt and slot machines.

There is, however, an acute pain caused by the 2012 Elantra. It sets in slowly, and it doesn’t afflict everyone, but to a car enthusiast, it might as well be a giant purple bruise on the face. This is the pain of surrender. Picking the Elantra as your daily driver says that you’ve given up trying to find a car that’s entertaining, choosing the soul-crushing appliance, instead.

It’s not that the Elantra does anything wrong, but it’s just the type of car you’d expect to find on the shelf at the big-box store next to Mr. Coffees and cut-rate electronics. While a ten-dollar automatic drip coffeemaker might satisfy the masses, some real-deal aficionados opt for the labor of a French Press, and so it is with cars.

The 2012 Hyundai Elantra will start every morning without complaint, and it can even sort-of coddle you in Limited trim with leather upholstery and heated rear seats. The stuff that drives that smug car-guy smirk at parties, though, is absent in the Elantra. You can’t close out a conversation about how great an enthusiast you are by proudly announcing you drive an Elantra unless you’ve flown in for a weekend and it’s a rental.

The 2012 Elantra is not a bad car, it’s just an obedient appliance. This may sound like damning with faint praise, when in fact, it’s paying tribute of the highest order. The driving experience of the  2012 Elantra has been so throughly scrubbed behind the ears that its demeanor is sweeter than a Southern Belle trashing her mother in law. As with great art, however, sometimes it’s the imperfections that make something truly beautiful. The 2012 Elantra could do with a couple bad habits.

The Elantra returns an EPA-estimated 40 miles per gallon on the highway. It has a ten-year, 100,000 mile warranty. There’s Bluetooth and airbags and, in the Limited I drove, four-wheel disk brakes, alloy wheels and spiffy tires. That’s ten more years of warranty and 99 kilomiles more security than you’ll get if you buy that $500 1988 LeBaron Turbo you’ve been eyeing. Great. Guess which one you’ll get better stories from?

You might think that the Elantra delivers those numbers with verve. Just look at that styling. Light swirls across the body of this car, creating dazzling specular highlights on the peaks of the sharp creases, and pooling in great whorls of shadows where the metal has been scooped out. This is Hyundai’s “Fluidic Sculpture” motif, and it’s distinctive. Hyundai apparently blew its wad on styling, because looking at the Elantra is a lot more thrilling than driving the thing.

Hyundai and Kia have this problem where they can do either floaty-soft or rattly-stiff, but anything in between becomes an oscillating nightmare of weird. The Elantra is one of the better-tuned Hyundais – the most I can really complain about is gummy-feeling electric power steering. It seems like Hyundai has finally gotten the 1990s memo about how to make small, affordable cars ride and handle like a million bucks. Practice makes perfect; they’ll get there someday.

The interior is nicely designed with materials that look nice and feel a little less-so. That’s the same as everyone else in the class, really, which means that consumers win. It would be nice to have a little more padding in places and the silvery plastic trim doesn’t project opulence, but this is a car that tops out around $20K, and with that in mind, it’s all very good. The controls are logical and well-placed, so  you’re not hunting and pecking like you might be in the Focus, for example. The dual-concentric temperature and fan controls are an especially intuitive nice touch.

The effort has been put into the powertrain, for sure. Most Elantra buyers will only care that it has one, and that the one it has operates efficiently. The smooth 1.8 liter four cylinder is spunky and it’s well paired with a six-speed automatic. There’s a standard six-speed manual in Elantra GLS models, but since this isn’t a car to tickle the fancy of enthusiasts, you’re better off just going for the auto. There’s surprisingly linear power delivery from this powertrain, without the giant valleys in torque delivery you might expect. It may be obedient and efficient, but that’s hard to pull off, and the 10.3:1 compression ratio helps the engine wind out 148 hp and 131 lb-ft of torque, and Hyundai manages that high amount of squeeze without needing direct injection, which keeps costs down.

That’s the thing with the 2012 Elantra; It’s groundbreaking, and yet, it’s not. Taken as a whole, this is one polished, if passion-less, car. There’s no whiz-bang stuff here, heck, there’s even a torsion beam rear axle. Hyundai has taken a page from the Toyota/Lexus playbook and obsessively done its best with proven parts and pratice to come up with a car that shines in terms of execution. Within the confines of a spreadsheet, the 2012 Hyundai Elantra is a formidable competitor in a quickly-crowding field. The groundbreaking achievement here is what the Elantra says about Hyundai and its ability to turn out a car that resides at the front of its pack.

The overall impression I’m left with is that the Elantra is a well-executed compact car with a veneer of style and a whole lot of features. It’s not the only car out there with style, the Chevrolet Cruze is handsome in a way we haven’t seen since the first-generation Cavalier made the scene. Also, the Ford Fusion is also no shrinking violet. If the goal for Hyundai was to beat the geriatric Toyota Corolla on style and driving verve, it’s succeeded. Everywhere else it turns in this class, though, success isn’t so effortless, and trading on the strength of features only goes so far when trying to pin the needle on the car-guy-o-meter.

What that means, of course, is that they’ll sell oodles of Elantras, perhaps even some to enthusiasts.

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What’s so special about this picture?

It’s that huge sign (relatively speaking – this is a scale-model diorama, after all) in between the fairly-odd-couple pairing of a Dodge Challenger SRT8 and an old-school Dodge Omni GLH. Go ahead and take another look…we’ll wait.

Welcome back.

Could it be a newly redesigned logo for the newly castrated updated Dodge Viper set to bow late next year?

Dodge has changed the Viper logo for every major redesign – so, once already so far.

Look for a WWTBAM final answer at this year’s LA Autoshow…

After spending quite some time building and engineering the only turbine powered Batmobile in existence, owner Casey Putsch has put the car up for auction. Which means some lucky person will be able to play Batman for $620K. If that sounds too rich for your blood, you could consider that between a Bugatti Veyron and this, the Batmobile will draw the crowd – and if that’s not enough, there still is only one of these. Plus, it’s a 2-fer, it’s sorta like buying a helicopter, right? How many excuses can you come up with to make this seem like a rational purchase to your friends or significant other?

Batmobile Specs:

• Fully independent, cockpit adjustable suspension with disc brakes
• Steel tubular space/monocoque chassis
• 4 forward speed semi-automatic, sequentially shifted transmission with reverse
• 365 horsepower Boeing turboshaft engine
• Fiberglass and aluminum coachwork
• Digital avionics and centrally mounted touch-screen iPad with 3G
• Fuel cell and racing approved on-board halon fire extinguishing system
• Approx. 2800 lbs.
• DOT approved turn-signals, tail, and headlights
• On-board air-compressor
• Stereo
• Air horn
• Runs on Jet A, Kerosene, or Diesel fuel

[nggallery id=turbinepoweredbatemobile]
Source: eBay

Sort of.

Actually, my wife and I replaced a higher-mileage Jeep Commander that suckled fuel pumps more forcefully than a starving newborn. It’s what you’d expect from a Hemi, but it was killing us.

We benefitted from incentives and the brain-bashing price war dealers and auto brands are locked in, and decided on a Mediterranean Blue 2011 Ford Edge SEL AWD. We were excited to finally have a safe, reliable SUV crossover to transport our young family around town, but the sweetness and light soon turned rocky…

Start with the good.

Something I love about Ford is its refresh/redesign cycles. Ford  “refreshes” are lately far more comprehensive than the styling nip and tucks that used to happen, usually in concert with decontenting. For example, the 2010 Mustang was virtually all-new for that year, despite the fact that it rides on the same platform. New organs – in the way of the 3.7L V6 and the Coyote 5.0 introduced in 2011 – and new skin make for a new car, in my eyes.

The 2011 Edge shares this philosophy. A smoother, more sculpted fascia features a more prominent corporate “tri-bar” grille flanked by vertical LED strips and projector headlamps. The rear of the 2011 Edge is also more sculpted, and the old clear-lens taillights have thankfully been dropped. The jig is up when you look at the 2011 Edge from the side. The profile is virtually indistinguishable from the first generation. That said, Ford has created a well-executed styling update on a current vehicle without needing to reinvent the wheel to convey freshness.

Topping off the exterior is a well-received and very well-executed optional Panoramic Vista Roof. It’s pricey, but the views and natural light throughout the cabin make it a must-have. Splurge. It’s available on all Edge models, and it’s worth it.

Inside, the dashboard and center stack are more handsome than before, and made from better materials. Physical buttons give way to the 7” MyFordTouch LED touchscreen – more on that later – or touch-sensitive center stack controls for radio and climate. The lack of tactile feedback is weird, but humans are adaptable. You’ll get used to it.  Except the damned hazard-lights button, which I keep setting off when trying to eject a disc. With the new dashboard, there’s not a whole lot of gadget storage, cause for concern until I found the nice little cubby beneath the center console.

The highly customizable gauge cluster – with 2 4.2” screens on either side of the analog speedometer – is wonky at times, but wildly gorgeous and useful at others.

MyFordTouch; segue to the not-so-good

There are two sides to every Schwartz, and with the good comes the not-so-good. MyFordTouch is standard on the Edge and is poised to become standard on all new FoMoCo models in the next several years. Many users – me included – complain of MFT’s response and lag after you press a button or command on the screen. If it were a smartphone, it would be acceptable, but this is a new paradigm for the automotive world. Over 100 years of buttons and levers in the car have spoiled us with their instant feedback and response. MFT is plagued by lag whether you are changing radio stations or trying to use the Sync voice recognition.

Other than a steep learning curve for voice commands, Sync is the bright spot in the otherwise dim reality of using MyFordTouch in the wild. Sync allows seamless connection of phone and MP3 devices, and you can tuck a wireless air card in the center console and turn your Edge into a rolling hotspot via USB. Slick.

While others might brandish a clenched fist, I have eventually come to find MFT tolerable. The screen is well laid out with 4 distinct quadrants for the phone, navigation/information, radio, and climate. I work with computers for a living, so laggy software is nothing new to me. When MFT works well, it is beautiful. Sometimes though, it seems more often than not, my wife or I are screaming obscenities to the dash. It’s like early iDrive in the sense that it’s ambitious and not quite there yet.

They’ll get there, and the beauty of the MyFordTouch system is that Ford is actively releasing patches for their software. With a little technical knowledge and a USB flash drive you can do the updates at home. The more complex updates can be performed at an authorized dealer. Again, slick.

Rough Start

Let me preface my story by saying that the overall buying experience was great and both the dealer and Ford showed a genuine interest in getting my problem solved.

The day after we purchased the Edge, I was entering the highway on a cloverleaf ramp, talking hands-free to my brother-in-law Jeremy via Sync. All of a sudden, a bang loud enough to alarm Jeremy on the other end of the phone shuddered through the vehicle. It felt like I’d hit a pothole, but I use this particular ramp every day on my way to work, and I was fairly certain there weren’t any potholes.

Pulling over to see what happened, I didn’t see any debris on the side of the road or damage to my vehicle. I got back in the Edge and circled my way back to the on-ramp to see if there was a pothole. As I suspected, it was as smooth as an Ohio road can be in mid-March. I did notice a hesitation when I’d press the gas pedal, so much that the engine would rev up before the car would move.

I took it to the dealership the next day and explained what happened. It was Saturday, so the service center was closed, but the Quick Lane oil service center on site was open. The Quick Lane manager drove it and didn’t notice anything. He checked for codes and came up with nothing. He advised me to bring it to the service center the following Monday.

They drove it for about a day before advising me that the whole rear end needed replacement. Apparently, the all-wheel drive system had a fault and it caused something to break in the rear axle housing. A week later, we had the Edge back, along with its sporadic hesitation. This is a dangerous problem to have.  If we were to pull into traffic and try to get out of the way, it could potentially cause an accident.

I immediately took it back to the dealer, and through weeks of them driving it and us driving it with a “black-box” electronic data recorder, we came up with exactly nothing.  It was frustrating, because we would take it to the dealer and it wouldn’t act up for them, but as soon as we got it home, it would hesitate. I even drove a mechanic around town for an hour, hoping it would act up with him in the car; no such luck.

2011 Ford Edge; Nightclub mode

By this time, it was mid-May and my wife and I had just from a weekend trip to Pittsburgh. The black box has made the 500 mile ride with us, though nothing happened. Back at home, it happened twice over the next couple days, and the black box snagged about a minute of recording each time. I immediately took it to the dealer to have it removed and analyzed.

The Service Manager called about a week later to say “Mr. Stearman, I have some good news.” “The last 2 recordings we got on the black-box were sent to Ford and they informed us that there was a Technical Service Bulletin released for this exact problem a week and a half ago. When can you bring it in?” (NOTE: Although the TSB had been released a week or two before, it hadn’t been applied to the individual VIN numbers yet.)

See TSB 11-05-06 here; which applies to the following vehicles:

FORD: 2010-2011 Taurus; 2009-2011 Edge & Flex; 2011 Explorer
LINCOLN: 2010-2011 MKS; 2009 MKX; 2010-2011 MKT & MKX

The following week – now the first week in June – we finally had our Ford Edge back in working order.

<Sarcasm>That wasn’t so bad, now was it??!? </Sarcasm>

In all seriousness, the Ford Edge is a great car. I honestly don’t think that you can judge it based on the ordeal we experienced. I also can’t stress enough how easy it was to work with the dealer and Ford to get the issue resolved. No matter who I talked to – either at the dealer or a Ford employee – I was treated with respect and tact. I always felt like it was a priority for them to get the problem resolved and am genuinely impressed with their customer service.

We’ll keep you updated on our long-term experiences with the 2011 Ford Edge. So far, it’s delivering on its promise of family-friendly size, stylish exterior and high-tech cabin.

Stay tuned.

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How can you help it? The guy helped bring to life the Dodge Viper, BMW 6-series and Pontiac GTO, and that’s just recently.

So what’s this book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, or in our case, Kindle Book about? Essentially, it’s about what led to the downfall of General Motors. I’ve personally been very critical of GM, after reading the book, perhaps some of that is unfair – but certainly not all of it.

General Motors began its slide 1970s. In the book, Bob explains how GM, flush with cash, started from scratch on its entire product line to meet the new Corporate Average Fuel Economy requirements. CAFE legislation hurt domestic manufacturers more than imports because global vehicles were already efficient enough or took less effort to meet the standards. In the process of redesigning the entire fleet, quality was flushed.

Lutz points out that CAFE is a joke (and hey, we’re doing it to ourselves again!) because domestic manufacturers make the best large trucks out there. Other brands try, and lately they’ve tried harder than ever, but they just aren’t as good as domestics and get worse gas mileage. Hello Nissan Titan. The Lutz alternative to CAFE is raising the gas tax.

Hold up Bob.

Pushing the burden onto the consumer for manufacturers lack of foresight into meeting future requirements is what got you into trouble in the first place. You postulate that if we had higher taxes on gas then people would be more motivated to make “wise” car buying choices like putting us all in Fiestas or Aveos.

Mr. Lutz, you’re sucking out our car souls.

We motorheads like our V8s and rear-wheel drive. Unless you have some plan to give us $20K 400 HP Camaros so that we can afford a second car, we reject your plan. Even a modest 25 cent increase that will gradually bring us even to Europe’s $7 a gallon prices it seems ridiculous to pay more in taxes for a gallon of fuel than for the actual gallon of gas. But we digress, we could write a book about how ass-backward energy policies are worldwide.

The crux of the book is really how Vehicle Line Executives (VLEs) and MBA eggheads justified horrible cars with festeringly-bad interiors by meeting internal goals. Yup, some group of bean counters with MBA sheepskins thought the Pontiac Aztek was a great car because it looked profitable on paper.

While Car Guys vs. Bean Counters focuses on how GM got in such an awful place, the larger question it raises is how America has changed from a manufacturing powerhouse to tottering on the edge of massive failure. The answer is greed. Our success led us to believe we deserved things that we didn’t. Lutz recounts asking GM executives how they could justify accepting outrageous UAW contracts. The answer was that the business guys had projected record sales coming and it was cheaper than a strike. We know where that got us.

Ultimately, this book leaves the impression that it’s time to call bullshit on the idea of “too big to fail.” Bailing out companies leaves the nation in fiscal mess. We feared that by letting companies go bankrupt we would lose too many jobs, but the 9-plus percent unemployment we’ve got in the wake of GM and Chrysler bailouts and $14 trillion in debt don’t exactly look like gains. Both points aren’t solely because of automaker bailouts, but the mentality that we deserve more than we have, and more than we can afford, persists.

Bob Lutz suggests that the position the United States is in forces everyone to readjust our sights, and that’s a good thing. Not everybody is going to have a six figure salary, you can’t afford a house on a fast-food pay check, and, of course, when executives make million dollar bonuses and then layoff thousands, they deserve taxpayer money even less than usual.

If you’re wondering how GM and the domestic auto industry got to the point of insolvency and why it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion over 3 decades – read this book. If you’re wondering why businesses fail left and right, why the country that used to be the best struggles to stay relevant, read this book. Change is the only constant, and big change appears to be afoot. If you’re maintaining a mentality that things will go back to the way they were and you’ll be able to make $100,000 a year with a job that has a “shift,” or if you think you deserve millions for being an executive of a company that’s hemorrhaging money, you’ll find that reality is a bitch.

Journalists are looking at the car right now at Toyota’s dog-and-pony show for the new car, which is happening in the Seattle, WA area.

That means you should grab your camera and bazooka-sized zoom lens and go see if you can snap 2012 Toyota Camry pictures. Then send them in to us. Autoblog has just posted some spy shots of the 2012 Camry, as well, so you can get vertigo trying to see through the camo.

In the meantime, we’re scouring the web looking for fissures in the wall of silence ahead of it dropping in late-August.

For now, check out this happy feel-good 2012 Camry Video that focuses on the Georgetown, KY production facility and its people.

More to follow.

You want me to prove it?

I can’t really, but I have been told to keep my eye on Seattle.

If no new version of the best-selling car in the United States emerges, just go to a sports bar and watch the Mariners play at Yankee Stadium, instead.

Do you want Toyota’s greatest technological achievement, all wrapped up in a single package?

Behold the diarrhea brown copper 2012 Lexus LFA.

Maybe my revulsion is due to poor lighting, or maybe car dealers suck at photography, probably both.  This beauty, I use that term loosely, had been available on eBay with a BuyItNow price of only $389,000.  The listing has since been removed, indicating either a successful sale or hara-kiri from shame.

Is the LFA still relevant in this new era of supercars?

It’s not that old, but the Lexus LFA seems to live in a bygone era. Color agnostic, the LFA was (keyword was) a direct competitor for cars like the the Ferrari F430, Lamborghini Gallardo, and even the dated-but-capable Porsche Carrera GT.  Yes, the F430 and Gallardo are significantly less expensive than the LFA, but their performance is about the same as the Lexus supercar delivers.

A new generation of supercars is now here. The Ferrari 458 Italia and even the spanking-new Lamborghini Aventador still undercut the price of the LFA. It’s looking more and more like Lexus is way behind, despite having just arrived. Maybe this is what happens when you take a decade to create a supercar. Maybe it won’t matter, and the LFA will be able to keep up in sales and performance thanks to its exclusivity.

On paper, the Aventador is the clear dollar-per-horsepower winner; especially when you consider the effectiveness of laying down all 700 horsepower with four wheels instead of two.

With only 500 LFAs being produced, Toyota might be able to get a pass on keeping up. Still, it seems that extreme sports cars are still wheeled hotcakes, even in an economic downturn. Lamborghini has found buyers for every 2011 Aventador it plans to build, for example. With the competition getting so much better, rarity may not be enough to keep interest up in a nearly $400,000 Lexus that’s likely to post inferior numbers in magazine comparison tests.

[Source: eBay Motors]