2017 10 Best Cars

Welcome to our 2017 10Best Cars. Each year for more than three decades, we’ve put dozens of new cars through thousands of miles of cumulative evaluation to determine our annual list of the very best automobiles for sale in America. The rules for consideration are simple: Entrants must cost less than $80,000 (anything pricier should be excellent by default), and they must be either a returning winner or all-new or significantly revised. Winning isn’t easy, however—in order to take home a trophy, a vehicle must offer good value, excel at its given mission, and, critically, deliver a pleasurable driving experience. These 10 cars deliver all of those qualities in spades. While none of them are perfect, they come closer to that ideal than anything else you can buy new.

Infinitis used to make some of the best sounds in the market straight from the factory, with the G and FX models in particular known for their hearty growls. Somewhere in the past few years, Nissan’s premium brand went and got a little more genteel. But now there’s an effort to inject some flair back into the brand’s aural signature with official sport exhaust kits for the curvaceous Q60 coupe and Q50 sedan. They should catch the ears of folks who prefer their driving experiences to delight every one of their senses.

Infiniti already has built various sporty spinoffs of the models, some for production and some not, including the Red Sport variants (the Q60 is pictured above) and the Eau Rouge and Project Black S concepts, but those are more holistic approaches to increased [...]