The Aerio was supposed to be Suzuki’s Corolla-beater. Born in ’01, refreshed in ’04, the Aerio is one of the few cars that can make a Corolla look sexy. While Suzuki’s website assures us “one thing is for sure about the Aerio: it really stands out in a crowd,” one thing’s for sure: it really doesn’t. The Aerio’s sheetmetal is so deeply and completely plain that Top Gear used it as a beast of burden for its ‘Star in a Reasonably Priced Car’ segment. And now it's a lame duck waddling into the history books. How should we remember this entry level captive import?

In Europe, BMW’s expanding model line-up has transformed the German automaker’s brand perception from the pistonhead’s prerogative to the arriviste’s wheels of choice. While the mighty M3 continues to rival Porsche’s 911 for street cred, and the previous gen M5 is still considered the Mack Daddy of sports sedans, BMW’s move into SUV’s and mass market motors has wounded its perceived pedigree. Is the hatchback-style, entry-level 1-Series another case of brand defilement, or is it a look back to classic small BMW’s like the 2002?

When better cars are built, Buick will build them. Meanwhile, they’re building CUV’s. Huh? An automotive brand whose lack of identity has kept it on life support for well over a decade wants a piece of a vehicular genre that’s a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and nothing in particular. GM’s willingness– make that “eagerness”– to throw Buick a CUV-shaped, badge-engineered bone demonstrates the corporate mothership’s abject and ongoing inability to devise a coherent plan to resuscitate its “damaged” (i.e. terminal) Buick brand. What is it with these guys?

You heeded our call. You nominated the cars you considered the best of the best. Without fear or favor, TTAC’s tenacious tribe of telic keyboard tappers selected twenty vehicles from your list of over a hundred superlative automobiles. You voted for 10 of them, creating our first annual Ten Best Automobiles. The voting was often extremely close, but the end result was never in doubt: a selection of ten automobiles that any self-respecting motorist would be proud to own, and delighted to drive. Ladies and gentlemen, raise your tea mugs as I present to you: TTAC’s Ten Best for 2007.

My wife struggles with two automotive tasks: finding her destination and maneuvering the car into a parking space. (Locating a parking space is another issue, but why make her sound any more spatially challenged than she is?) The only voice my wife follows without question emanates from her car’s navigation system. So, issue number one sorted. Until now, she has endured her parking problem by opting for garages or HUGE spots. When she heard about the Lexus LS’ new automated parking system, she sent me to the dealer to check it out.

According to market researchers, American car buyers are more likely to ask “will I look cool in this thing?” than “is this the most efficient way to get from point A to point B?” Despite Honda’s rep for building the automotive equivalent of sensible shoes, CEO Kochi Kondo understands that America’s love affair with the automobile gets kinky from time to time. Well if he didn’t before, he does now, after Honda’s bizzaro Element somehow found favor with American grey panther platform refugees. You can almost hear him at the karaoke bar singing “You gotta fight, for your right, to paaaaaarrty!”

Having wrested the title “world’s largest car manufacturer” from General Motors, Toyota’s already committing some of the same mistakes that brought GM down. The all-new 2008 Scion xB is a blot on Toyota’s relatively unblemished copybook. It bristles with classic GM-think: dumb it down, fatten it up and cheapen it out.

Car-based crossovers (CUV's) are America’s SUV escape pod of choice. Domesticated SUV’s from Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Ford and more have found favor, as have their upmarket homonyms. Although GM was late to the crossover party, the GMC Acadia and Saturn Outlook are (at least for the moment) highly competitive products. At the top end, Cadillac stands pat with its three-year-old SRX. For '07, Caddy’s attempted to re-invigorate their CUV with a new interior.

Global warming. Some consumers consider hybrids the responsible response. Others are busy taking one last toke on the tailpipe of extravagance. Pistonheads, have I got a bong for you! After accelerating Porsche's 2.5 ton brick to 60mph in less than five seconds, I can only conclude that you NEED a Cayenne Turbo– if only to outrun the Earth Day crowd tossing rocks at your windows. The Turbo is pointless and politically incorrect and you better get one now before all the oil and clean air are gone forever.

When it comes to full size pickups, three words have dominated headlines over the last six months: Toyota, Toyota, Toyota. Can the Tundra penetrate the Big 2.5’s final sanctuary? Who will crumble first, GM or Ford? It’s made in Texas! Yada, yada. But Toyota’s not the only American-made foreign brand playing in the full-size pickup truck sandbox. Nissan was here first and they’re not going away. So can this Mississippi Titan play ball or is it destined to remain a third-string niche player?

In 2001, Land Rover parachuted their not-so-cute ute across the pond. The Freelander landed with a splat. Gas was cheap and XXL SUV's dominated the landscape. What's more (or less), the 174 horse Freelander was technologically quaint, reliability challenged and forgot to show up for its federal crash test. And so Land Rover has redeployed the second-generation Freelander, the forgettably-named LR2, into the American market. This time, sales of big SUVs are in the toilet, there's a burgeoning compact SUV market and Land Rover's traditional entryway, the LR3 (nee Discovery), now costs a lofty $45k+.

When the BMW dealer handed me the plastic fob, he insisted I drive the 335i Convertible with the top down. Despite the cool, foggy San Francisco weather, I held the plipper’s unlock button down and watched the show. As the hardtop began its elaborate three part dance into the trunk, I felt that old familiar flutter. The feeling was born when I started driving lessons in my Dad’s 1963 Chevrolet Impala rag top, survived my first car (a 1962 VW Beetle convertible) and lead to my current stable of drop tops. Would the 335i live up to its predecessors?

In an era where Explorers are MIA and Expeditions can't make it out of base camp, Ford's cute ute is a mission-critical machine. If Ford's going to Escape its financial woes, their compact SUV has to at least keep the lights on. To find out if the new Ford Escape is "the end to boredom" (as the website proclaims) or simply "the end of the line," I ran America's most popular softroader up the Adirondacks, down the interstate, into Manhattan traffic and ‘round the ‘burbs.

Saab may have been "Born from Jets," but there's little about the brand's current offerings that you'd call state-of-the-art. The 9-3 has changed little since its ‘03 introduction. The 9-7X dates back to the ‘02 Chevy TrailBlazer. And the 9-5 has been stuck in holding pattern since ‘98. I recently tested a 9-5 to see if the quirky car lives up to its high tech brand proposition. My range-topping tester's trim designation: "Aero." That pounding sound you hear is GM's marketers driving home the high-altitude hype.

CUV’s are nothing more than oversized station wagons on stilts. If you think about it– and not many American motorists have– CUV’s don’t work like a truck OR handle like a car. I wouldn’t say they’re the worst of both worlds, but others have. In fact, the modern CUV may just be a marketing-driven gimmick designed to take one last shot at emigrating gas guzzlers before they get down from their perch and do something really sensible, like buy a car. No wonder Mitsubishi’s website says the Outlander doesn’t like labels any more than I do.