Fact: These are not the eight fastest cars you can buy. If they were, we'd call the award The Eight Fastest Rides. We don't. We call it The Eight Great Rides, and not only because it rhymes.
These are the eight new cars we like best, plain and simple. We spend the entire year testing cars. Some we like, some we don't. Then there's a small group that pushes our nitrous buttons. These are the cars that become eight great rides--that is, if they're available for sale in some volume in the contiguous United States and carry a sticker price under our $30,000 price cap.
Choosing the eight cars sounds easy. It's not. This year there were at least a handful more we'd shave our heads for. But after dozens of mountain road runs, hundreds of around-town rallies and thousands of freeway miles, we successfully whittled the list to a very well-deserving eight.
Four of last year's winners return to the list essentially unchanged. They are the Subaru WRX, Mazda Miata, Toyota MR2 Spyder and Toyota Celica GT-S. Two other 2001 honorees, the Nissan Sentra SE and the Ford Focus ZX3, also return. Well, sort of. They've been replaced by the new Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec-V and the Ford SVT Focus.
The final two spots on this year's list go to the new Acura RSX Type-S, which is a spiritual successor to the Integra Type R (a perennial Eight Great), and the Hyundai Tiburon, which is actually a 2003 model, and the first Hyundai to ever make the list. After we choose the eight, which involves a fair amount of name calling between staff members, we gather the cars at the track. There we put each through our usual battery of tests, which includes acceleration (0-30, 0-60, 30-50, 50-70 and quarter mile), braking (60-0) and handling (average lateral acceleration around a 200-ft. skidpad and speed through a 700-ft. slalom). The results of those tests are reported on the following pages.
There you have it, this year's Eight Great Rides, the best of the best. Congratulations to each.