It’s fitting that we traveled to Half Moon Bay, California, home to a massive seagull population, to test a new type of gull. The 2010 Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, one of the most exotic, outrageous new cars to debut in recent memory, harks back to the days when Sir Sterling Moss piloted its spirtual father, the ’50s 300SL Gullwing.

Once, compact pickups were truly that: Light duty, nimble versions of those hulking behemoths called half-tons. Over the years, however, the big ‘uns got more car-like and the little ‘uns got, well, bigger. Case in point: The Dodge Ram’s little Dakota brother, which is quickly outgrowing its sheetmetal as it tries to play with the big boys.

Driving Aston Martin’s new flagship droptop, the DBS Volante, it’s hard not to conjure up some excessively cliché Bond images. Yet unlike Her Majesty’s secret agent, with his unlimited bar tab, we desired a taste of fancy champagne on a decidedly Miller High Life budget.

It doesn’t take much to get us excited about a visit to the music-friendly city of Nashville – even the, uh, thrilling opportunity to sample Nissan’s very, very mildly refreshed Altima sedan was enough to pique our interest.

It’s not unusual to find someone else’s playlist still on the hard drive of a higher-end press car’s audio system when it shows up in our driveway for a week-long evaluation. Sometimes it’s fun to guess who had the vehicle last – the Barbara Streisand collection (200 songs, really?) in a Dodge Charger, for example. But no music has ever seemed more appropriate than “The Phantom of the Opera” soundtrack in a Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8.

West Point, Georgia, is rising again like a Phoenix from the ashes. Only now, this dot on the map on the border with Alabama is dealing with hardware, instead of the soft goods it once produced. The 2011 Kia Sorento has come to town.

Down and dirty – that’s the way trucks like it. Despite the presence of those persnickety owners who regularly wax and scrub their cherished pickups, the Ford F-150 FX4 was designed to be used the way haulers were intended.

They say things are always bigger in Texas. Naturally, then, it’s the perfect place for Dodge to show off the biggest of their latest offerings: The new Dodge Ram Heavy Duty trucks. Despite the current economic trends that have Chrysler down in the dumps and most of their corporate brass learning Italian, the Dodge division has moved forward with the introduction of the Heavy Duty 2500 and 3500 models.

As a fully grown automaker, Acura has a few SUVs and crossovers on the market already filling needs of various segments and buyers. So, with this complete portfolio, what is an automaker to do? How about announce another: The Acura ZDX.

When it was first announced, the purists howled in disbelief. The critics, they scoffed like they’ve never scoffed before. Porsche was a builder of sports cars, they growled and snarled!

Porsche should be used to this by now.

There’s been something in the water over Turin way ever since Sergio Marchionne took the top job in town. The whole Fiat Group has been gathering momentum since he took charge and, while they burst onto the global scene by buying up Chrysler without paying a cent, hindsight could best remember his frenzied period for this car.

Its non-press-fleet siblings are common sights on rental car lots at most major airports in North America. The Dodge Avenger SXT is the mainstream version of the car that, for all intents and purposes, looks as though it is a growth-stunted version of the Dodge Charger, even if it doesn’t quite move like one.

As the Hyundai Genesis Sedan has shown, you don’t need a fancy name to move up the automotive food chain. But can just any automaker make the same shift? We’re about to find out as Suzuki’s all-new mid-size Kizashi is set to hit the U.S. market later this year.

Road Atlanta would have been a most appropriate place to test out the freshly redesigned Volkswagen GTI. But the fact that this track, nestled in the rolling hills of Braselton, Georgia, is already booked for a little driving clinic called “Le Petit LeMans” makes such testing impossible. No matter, though, as the roads leading to the facility are almost as good as the track itself.

That youthful, playful and slightly rough around the edges Subaru we once knew has passed through its awkward puberty stage to become a fully grown up automaker. No longer cranking out the outlandish, like the Brat or Baja, Subaru has chosen to focus on the mainstream with its redesigned Legacy.

The Range Rover Sport has been a popular model for Land Rover since it debuted in 2005 as a 2006 model, but the British automaker’s first attempt at a sporting ‘ute was by no means an out-of-the-ballpark home run. Customers complained about the Range Rover Sport’s sub-par interior materials and lackluster powertrains – even in Supercharged-guise – but Land Rover has all but solved those issues with the Sport’s 2010 refresh.

Chrysler has struggled to produce any kind of automotive hit over the past few years – see the Chrysler Sebring – but the automaker’s LX-based cars (Chrysler 300, Dodge Charger and Challenger) have proven to be rare exceptions. However, those cars are getting on in age, so we decided to take a look at the high-performance Charger SRT8 to see if it was still relevant in today’s market.

It has been about 10 years since Lamborghini released a rear-wheel drive car, so the Gallardo LP550-2 Vittorio Balboni is long, long overdue. We should have picked up the hint when the Gallardo upgrade was christened “LP560-4” because you wouldn’t call it “4” when everybody knew it was all-wheel drive, unless you were planning to launch something with something else.

Toyota has been taking it in the shorts lately. Chief Akio Toyoda has claimed the company is “grasping for salvation” and needs to get back to the job of building cars that people can be passionate about. Even though sales are down, they’re still surpassing rivals – but in reality, Toyota has long been a purveyor of really good appliances.

Spiky mullets, spandex-infused jeans for men and European carryalls: Just because it’s cool in Europe doesn’t mean it’s cool in the land of the free and the home of the bailout.