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Though we rarely meet a Porsche we don't like, the 911 GT3 - a hardcore, track-tuned version of the legendary sports car - has always occupied a soft spot in our hearts. That likely won't change, as the 2010 Porsche 911 GT3 has grown in all the right places.

Apologies to the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, but the 2010 Mercedes-Benz SL65 Black Series has just trumped it as the most powerful Mercedes-Benz ever made. This rare and menacing SL is the third Mercedes to earn Black Series status, and while the third time is usually the charm, in this case it's a cruise missile. With all the king's horses - 661 of them - Mercedes says that its ber-Benz accelerates to 60 mph in 3.6 seconds and needs to be electronically restrained to its 199-mph top speed.

It's no secret that we like the Jaguar XF at Automobile Magazine. The keys to our XF Supercharged Four-Seasons test car are rarely sitting around and we keep piling on the miles. We even named the newest Jaguar sedan a 2009 All-Star. But, like you, we've seen the spy photos and knew the English brand had something hotter coming. That hotter something is the XFR, released here at the Detroit show.

Sleek and sexy are words that are rarely associated with Volvos. Rather, the name Volvo generally conjures up adjectives such as safe and secure. Yet, the 2009 Volvo S60 concept seeks to change that notion and instead prove that a Volvo can be both safe and sexy.

In a year when the U.S. auto market has been knocked out cold by the one-two punch of spiking fuel prices and the financial meltdown, it's not easy finding a hero in the car business. Now that the tide of easy credit and cheap gasoline has gone out, we see that a lot of car companies have been swimming naked. But not Honda. Honda's steadfast refusal to follow the herd once looked stubborn but now appears prescient. In an era when platinum-paid executives rarely deviate from the orthodoxy of the crowd, Honda's Takeo Fukui has successfully avoided faddish trends and instead stayed true to the founding principles of Soichiro Honda and his successors. For that, Honda president and CEO Takeo Fukui is the 2009 AUTOMOBILE MAGAZINE Man of the Year.