Auto News 5

Whoa there, Nelly! The initial throttle tip-in is too aggressive and makes it difficult to pull away smoothly from a stop. I know that Kia wants its SX models to have a sportier feel than other trim levels, but give us progressive throttle response, please. Compared with lesser Sorento models, the SX gets its own body kit, which includes gaping fog-light openings, which I don't care for, and LED taillights, which I do: a slim ring of diodes serve as running lights, and the diodes within the ring illuminate under braking. It looks very cool.

I took my recently licensed son and his freshly registered 2004 BMW 325xi wagon to the Tire Rack Street Survival teen-driving program last week, and boy, if I wasn't surprised. Run by the BMW Car Club of America Foundation, in association with Consumer Reports -- which donated its impressive test track in rural Colchester, Connecticut, to the effort -- it was an excellent introduction to safe driving. And unlike some of the pricey driving schools that we of the gearheaded persuasion hope to attend with our offspring before they do anything really stupid, it costs practically nothing. In fact, the $75 registration fee is some of the best money you could ever spend on a young driver whose first car, unlike some I could name, already has working brakes and headlights. Those of us who know what camshafts are and who learned to drive stick shifts at a young age tend to think we're good, safe, fast drivers out of the box; turns out, we're mostly not. I'm not the last word in driver skill today, far from it. But, in retrospect, until I took some advanced training in my late twenties, I fairly sucked.

As the office manager at Automobile Magazine, I don't often have the opportunity to drive the cars in our test fleet. In fact, I had sworn off driving any of them about a year ago when the BMW 7-series I was shuttling suffered a glancing blow with a metal pole. So it was an unexpected pleasure to have deputy editor Joe DeMatio, who must have decided that I had completed my penance, offer me the chance to spend a weekend with the Mazda Miata.