Top Speed

After gas prices started strangling truck sales, the 2008 Malibu was an early bright spot in Chevrolet’s volume-car lineup. The sedan claimed a spot on our 10Best list for 2008, but was not without its shortcomings. Its styling was clean but unexciting, and the back seat in particular wasn’t as spacious or comfortable as those in its chief competitors.

Redesigned for 2013, the Malibu addresses a few of those complaints—and ignores or even exacerbate others. It’s 2.7 inches wider, but the wheelbase is significantly shorter—down 4.5 inches—and rear legroom shrinks by 0.8 inch. Measured interior volume is up 2.6 cubic feet, but the reduction in length means that major gains are in hip- and shoulder room when they really needed to be made fore and aft. The trunk grows one cubic foot, from 15 to 16. Front suspension remains a strut-type setup, and the rear is still a multilink. Variable-assist electronic power steering is standard on all Malibu models.

Chevy also offers a mild-hybrid Malibu Eco and a turbocharged 2.0-liter range-topper with 259 hp, but the car tested here packs the base engine, an all-new naturally aspirated 2.5-liter inline-four. With a block and head cast from aluminum, dual overhead cams with variable valve timing, and direct fuel injection, the 2.5 is state of the art. With 197 hp and 191 lb-ft of torque, it’s also quite potent—that’s more twist than any other base four in the Malibu’s segment. Better still, its EPA-estimated fuel economy of 22 mpg in the city and 34 on the highway betters last year’s weaker (by 28 hp) base motor. All 2013 Malibus get a six-speed automatic transmission.

Warning: Tirade Ahead!

So the new Malibu’s specs paint a mixed picture. (Less legroom? This is a class in which space and comfort are of the utmost importance.) In person, though, our consensus is that it paints a flat-out discordant picture. Style is an individual preference, so all we’ll say is that we’re not fans.

Open the door, though, and you’ll forget all about the exterior styling. Discretion is not just the better part of valor, it’s the better part of everything. It enables such enjoyable phenomena as social drinking and civil disobedience, but you won’t find discretion in the Malibu’s interior styling. There is an overwhelming assortment of colors, textures, and finishes inside, and our example’s optional two-tone leather makes the Malibu’s cabin look like the equivalent of a Top Chef challenge in which contestants must use every one of a wild assortment of ingredients—including American cheese. We counted at least eight different materials/textures—not pieces, mind you, but different types of material—making up just the front door panel, and we didn’t even count the little parts. The seats in our car were black leather with teal stitching, orange-ish-brown faux-football-look inserts, and piping that was almost the same color as the football-looking swaths but not quite.

That’s Where All the Restraint Went

PAGANI. PAGANI? SI, SI, PAGANI!

After 14 years as the auto industry’s House of Fabergé, Pagani Automobili has built the paltry sum of 132 cars, just shy of Ferrari’s output every two weeks. Most are the original Zonda, with just 10 of the new, U.S.-bound Huayras yet in existence. Judging from the interrogations we received while stuck behind a massive wreck on the autostrada only 10 minutes from Pagani’s Modena, Italy, headquarters, that’s not enough to sear the brand into the consciousness of the locals, who are accustomed to seeing Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, and Ducati test vehicles tearing up their streets.

Horacio Pagani’s customers—an all-hands meeting wouldn’t make a decent lunch rush at a Denny’s—don’t seem to mind the brand’s obscurity. If you can peel off an easy million for a new Huayra, which starts at 849,000 euros or, when it arrives later this year, the spot-exchange equivalent in dollars, chances are good you own a lot of stuff that Italian truck drivers have never heard of.

To be sure, Modena is a tough town to make a splash in. But the Huayra (pronounced WHY-ra) has the requisite assets. It’s not just that it’s flagrantly gorgeous even while dragging its belly over an Italian speed hump. Or that it is adorned with fascinating details, from its soybean-sprout mirrors to the four titanium Inconel peashooters in back. Or that the carbon fiber’s clear coat looks deep enough to do 10-meter platform dives into.

And it isn’t just the beguiling movement of the Huayra’s motorized body surfaces that constantly lift and tuck like an F-16’s flaperons with the goal of reducing body roll and stopping distances. Or the  720-hp, 6.0-liter twin-turbo V-12, the old single-cam three-valver from the S65, custom built for Pagani by Mercedes-Benz AMG and anodized to a gilded fare-thee-well to resemble the Ark of the Covenant. Or even the cockpit with its bionic-Bauhaus sculptures in cut aluminum that make the driver feel like Lucky Starr chasing the Pirates of the Asteroids.

What really makes the Huayra startling is that all of its highly cultivated (and, in some cases, efficaciously questionable) flair pulls together to make a stupendous road car. The level of lateral grip, the triple-digit stability, and the braking and steering control give this Beaux-Arts glamour boat the muscle to mix it up with the cars from Brand F and Brand L. Think Le Mans prototype with carpeting and license-plate mounts.

Ford once wanted us to spell the name of its doomed electric-car concern as Th!nk. That makes Volkswagen’s mandate of an exclamation point on its “up!” city car seem less grammatically absurd. Still, we’re putting typographic cheekiness aside and rendering it Up.

Cuteness, typographic or otherwise, is the norm in little city runabouts. Invariably, they project a sort of sexless kookiness. But this European-market city car, down one cylinder and more than seven inches of length to a Mini, is a product of typically sober VW. Its comes by its cuteness less overtly. With its 15-inch wheels pushed all the way to the corners, the Up looks improbably simple, as if sketched as a cartoon. Children’s book creator Richard Scarry might have drawn the happy Up, no doubt being driven by a smiling cat wearing lederhosen.

Our smiles while driving the Up weren’t as broad, but we were smitten with its cool charm, its clown-car-like feats of packaging, and its ambience, which is not at all chintzy. It’s a refreshingly honest little box of transportation, which VW won’t bring to the States anytime soon because the car is far too sensible. There’s nothing revolutionary about the Up. It follows the basic blueprint that the original Mini laid down more than a half-century ago. Simply tuck the tiny 74-hp, 999-cc engine into the front pocket of this 2029-pound commuter, and leave the rest to package the flesh of adult humans.

Naturally, the Up is very slow (11.8 seconds to 60 mph), and its skinny tires struggle to hold 0.80 g on the skidpad. But the Up feels nimble, lithe, and unburdened. And this city car isn’t intimidated by interstates, where it is unusually stable and quiet for a squirt. The only econo-car nastiness is the traditional three-cylinder vibration that runs through the primary controls.

The Up returned 36 mpg in mixed driving, splitting the difference between B-segment cars we’ve tested and small hybrids.