2005 Ford Five Hundred Limited, Buick LaCrosse CXS, Chrysler 3

Remember the date: Fall 2004 will go down in history as the moment when the Motor City finally cast aside its feeble efforts in the mid-size sedan arena and once again began building big, bold, American four-doors with the moxie and the quality to seriously challenge the segment-leading Japanese brands. Hallelujah.

Gathered here are the latest three from this long-overdue Midwestern-design renaissance: the audacious Chrysler 300, the substantial Ford Five Hundred, and the beguiling Buick LaCrosse. Two of the three contain substantial underpinnings sourced from familiar corporate relations in Europe. Lurking beneath the Ford Five Hundred is a sizeable chunk of the Volvo S80's platform, while the Chrysler 300's skeleton has plenty of previous-generation Mercedes-Benz bones to it. But don't bother with the details, because at their heart is pure American attitude.

Are these three new Americans as good as the fanfare suggests? To find out, we've pitted them against that American-style sedan benchmark with the distant country code: the Toyota Avalon. Let the fireworks begin.

Driving Toyota's Avalon is like going to Disneyland and seeing Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. It's not actually Abe up there, but a high-tech facsimile constructed to give you a credible Abe experience. Instead of delivering the Gettysburg Address, however, Toyota's mechanical subterfuge provides a recreation of a decades-earlier American automotive driving experience: the hushed, bank-vault quietness that armor-gauge bodywork once afforded, the liquidy-lope called "boulevard ride," and the room to sprawl lazily and stretch your legs.

This second-generation Avalon has impressively managed to emulate these feats atop the previous-generation Camry's aging platform, despite little difference to its wheelbase, track width, or overall length. To achieve the Avalon's generous interior room, Toyota wriggled out of these confines by inflating the car's profile, causing one driver to call its looks a Toon-Town version of the Mercedes-Benz C-Class. Rough, perhaps, but the Avalon does have remarkably slab-sided flanks, as though it were an entrant in a contest to see what you could do to flat sheetmetal and technically still call it styling.