Hammer Time

One is a Posh Suv Fitted With an Absolutely Sublime Supercharged V8 Engine Making the Kind of Noises That Entice Angels to Descend From the Heavens. The Other is a Red-blooded Sports Car in Suv Disguise, Powered by a Ferrari Engine. This is the Story of Two Spectacular Compact Suvs.

Most new drivers are pretty darn useless. It’s not that they lack the skill, they have that, we’re sure. It’s rather a case of the modern car being so good that young drivers don’t get to develop any decent driving skills.

With the advent of traction control, there’s no more unintentional drifting (except if you disable the system, of course) in a powerful rear-wheel-drive car. Like when you borrowed your

dad’s rear-wheel-drive car with a couple of your friends, tackled a corner way too fast (possibly also supplemented by a deft flick of the steering wheel to unsettle the rear) and the back-end stepped out, which you promptly corrected with copious amounts of countersteer, resulting in a delightful power slide, accompanied by a nonchalant ‘oops’ – as if you had never intended for that to happen.

Thanks to fancy stability control systems, even the most hapless driver can now ‘pilot’ a high-powered vehicle through a corner faster than our grandparents ever thought possible in their motoring heydays.

In some cases, it’s like handing a loaded bazooka to a six-year-old and telling him to definitely, unquestionably not press the fire button. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Nowadays, cars also brake for you. They steer for you. They navigate themselves to a destination. If all goes wrong and you land up in an accident, a trillion and 10 airbags, fancy safetybelt systems and a whole lot of other whatnots are supposed to prevent you from ending up with a headache, or broken limb.

Back in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and a little bit in the ’90s, high performance cars were intent on killing you. They attempted to do this by letting you believe, for a brief while, that you were a driving god. Then, just when you thought the bucket of driving talent handed to you was bottomless... the bucket ran out.