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Of the current Volvo offerings, the XC70 is the most station wagon-like of the bunch. But the fact that the XC60 handily outsells the XC70 is proof that what the market wants is different from what many purists and I believe Volvo should be building.

Chevrolet's Impala name has been around a long time. It was first appended to a 1956 Motorama car that I helped create the year before, then it was affixed to a production model in 1958. Except for a couple of hiatuses in the 1980s and '90s, it has been in use during forty-five model years. Enormously popular in the 1960s, the Impala sold more than a million units in the U.S. during the 1965 model year, a record never equaled by any other single nameplate, before or since. This 2014 Impala continues the front-wheel-drive configuration adopted at the turn of the century, albeit on a much more sophisticated platform. The transversely mounted small-block V-8 is long gone, and -- surprisingly -- for the first time a pair of four-cylinder engines supplement the V-6 that had become the Impala's standard powerplant.