Comparison Tests
Here are a pack of four-doors that will still get you a decent parking spot at the country club without selling your oldest daughter into slavery or burning down your house for the insurance dough. After all, this is the Brave New Century, and anyone who won't throw down for a luxury sedan with athletic pretensions can't be considered a player. So sit back, hug your 401k, adjust the trifocals, and pay attention, because what follows is the real skinny.
By our count, there are more than three dozen four-door luxury sedans sold in the United States that routinely sell for more than $30,000. They range in size and price from the entry-level Acura 3.2TL to the Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph Park Ward limo, the latter representing a stratum where only a few Fortune 500 moguls and some well-established South Florida drug dealers dare to play.
In the middle of this vast upmarket milieu lies a slick stable of sports sedans from automakers in Germany, Japan, Old Blighty, and God's own U.S. of A. All seven selected for this test are powered by overhead-camshaft, naturally aspirated V-8 engines generating between 275 (the Mercedes-Benz E430) and 340 horsepower (the Infiniti Q45). All but the Audi A6 and the Cadillac DTS were rear-drivers, and the price spread was about $12,000 between the cheapest (the Infiniti Q45 at $51,047) and the priciest (the Mercedes at $62,929).
The turf chosen for this test was Alexandria Bay in the dazzling Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York, and we included a foray into the open two-lanes of the Adirondack Mountains. Our flinty-eyed team also planned to shake down the cars not only within the pristine precinct of the Empire State but also across the mighty St. Larry for a romp in Ontario, Canada. In retrospect, we should have remained among our neighbors to the north because the woods of New York were swarming with gray-uniformed men driving blue and yellow Crown Victorias sporting the latest Stalker radar guns and enough electronic equipment to be candidates for capture by the Chinese military. Two of our crew were gunned down by these revenuers - one of whom won a trip to a backwoods court after the state's Big Brother mainframe revealed that a bureaucratic lapse had resulted in the suspension of his driver's license. (See my column in this issue.)
The results of four days of hard running, logging nearly 1150 miles in each car, are just a few lines ahead on these pages. Be aware that all of these are solid, well-engineered automobiles. It is difficult to harshly chastise any of them, and the balloting was sufficiently close that the runners-up might want to consider a Palm Beach County-style recount. But there being no dimpled ballots or hanging chads here, the results are final. Love 'em or hate 'em, here's the way the numbers shook out.
