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Most fun to drive

Last updated: October 2012

Fun to drive is a subjective measure—an elusive quality that can mean different things to different people. From our experience, a car can have a very powerful engine and accelerate quickly, but without handling agility, it's not much fun. For us, fun is a combination of factors such as handling response, sound, and the nature of the power delivery that lead to grin-inducing satisfaction. To come up with our list of the most fun cars to drive, we first took a slice according to our scores for handling, steering feel, and body control. Then we looked at acceleration, but found most cars today have plenty of power. Finally, we took a secret ballot to give our testers a chance to capture those elusive subjective qualities, including sounds. Below, we present our picks for the cars that are the most and least fun to drive.

Category Most fun Least fun
Sports coupes Scion FR-S, Subaru BRZ, BMW 135i Scion tC
Roadsters & convertibles Mazda Miata, Mini Cooper S, Porsche Boxster BMW Z4
High performance Chevrolet Corvette Z06  
Muscle cars Ford Mustang Chevrolet Camaro
Luxury sedans Infiniti M37, Jaguar XJ, Audi A6, Cadillac CTS, Porsche Panamera BMW 750Li, Volvo S80 3.2
Sports sedans Infiniti G37, Audi A4 Lexus IS 250
Small & subcompact cars Mazda3, Volkswagen Golf, Ford Focus Nissan Versa, Scion iQ, Smart ForTwo
Small SUVs Mini Cooper Countryman, Nissan Juke, Volkswagen Tiguan, BMW X3, Ford Escape Jeep Compass
Midsized SUVs Porsche Cayenne, BMW X5 Toyota 4Runner
   

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