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Months in Fleet: Seven
Mileage to Date: 16,507

Now that Buick has fewer internal competitors, its first truly new sedan in more than a decade might garner some attention. The 2010 LaCrosse drops the ancient 3.8-liter V-6 and W-body platform that have served as the basic ingredients for every mid-size Buick sedan since the 1990 Regal; in their place, it uses mechanicals from the Opel Insignia. That means it rides on the next generation of GM's Epsilon architecture and is powered by a pair of direct-injection V-6s producing either 255 or 280 hp.

Programming guru Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare talked about a different kind of design, but his comments accurately summed up the Infiniti Essence concept car long before it was conceived: "There are two ways of constructing a design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." For its 2009 Geneva show car, Infiniti's design team chose the latter.