Compact Sport Comparison - Bang for the Bucks - Road Test Revi

Money isn't everything. At least, that's what the suits in the Motor Trend penthouse keep telling us. But what if you want a standout set of wheels? Something special: extroverted, quick, cool enough to accessorize with hot dates. For that, you need a checking account so big your bank gave you a free toaster factory. Right?

Allow us to make your day: As it turns out, four-wheeled adrenaline is readily available for less than the average new-car transaction price of around $30 grand. You just have to know where to invest.

That's where we come in. Gathered here are our picks for the five coolest performance cars available for under $30K. In choosing our quintet, we fired up our Cray supercomputer, carefully crunched through gigabytes of statistics from our monolithic performance-results database, applied several complex mathematical formulae incorporating theorems from Galileo and Bernoulli, then tossed all that numerical hoo-ha into the dumpster and ordered a pepperoni pizza. Our minds thus properly prepared, we grabbed a pencil, wrote down our favorite fast rides in the sub-$30,000 category, and pronounced our work sacrosanct.

Just because these buggers are affordable doesn't mean they don't sizzle: All will do the sprint to 60 mph in under six seconds and the quarter mile in 14.5 seconds or better, and all five can slip through the slalom cones at more than 63 mph and stop from 60 mph in less than 126 feet. You'll be entertained, trust us.

Note that each car wears our own officially copyrighted and trademarked Cool Rating, a 1-to-10 score (10 being coolest) that takes into account all those hard-to-quantify (but oh-so-important) elements that go into deciding which car to buy: styling, uniqueness, status, standing in the valet-parking hierarchy, date-bait quotient, ability to complement a pair of $300 Oliver Peoples sunglasses, etc. The higher the Cool Rating, the better your chance of being mistaken for Pierce Brosnan when you pull into the 7-Eleven for some Milk Duds.

So, no more complaining about not being able to afford a flash car. If you aren't grinning at the helm of one of these babies, you might want to check yourself for a family history of lockjaw.