This Is Stupid

The world’s fastest and silliest SUVs square off for a ticket to best driver’s car

- Christian Seabaugh

My face hurts from smiling. My ears are ringing. My shoulders ache. Behind me, four Skittle colored SUVs tick-tick-tick in the mountain air.

Go ahead, hurl insults. Grocery getter. Mall crawler. Chelsea tractor. Family hauler. Too big. Too heavy. Too clumsy.

Yet these stupidly powerful brutes— the 2020 Bentley Bentayga Speed, 2019 Jaguar F-Pace SVR, 2019 Lamborghini Urus, and 2019 Porsche Cayenne Turbo, boasting 2,358 horses and 2,360 lb-ft of torque combined—are the best-driving SUVs on the road. Heck, they are among the most fun vehicles I’ve driven this year, period. And one of them is going to earn its way into the crucible that is Best Driver’s Car.

Each of these SUVs puts its power down through an eight-speed automatic and a grippy all-wheel-drive system. All offer levels of performance that would have easily put them in the running for the top spot at Best Driver’s Car as recently as 2011, when the Ferrari 458 Italia won. The performance capability of these four is simply silly.

But one has to be the silliest, stupidest, most fun super SUV on the road.

With our annual Best Driver’s Car competition fast approaching and a hard cap on the number of performance cars we could bring, we decided to reprise our play-in game to determine which SUV earns a ticket to one of the most grueling performance car tests in the world.

Last year the Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio won entry, and the stunning $93,190 Italian finished an impressive eighth place in a field of record-setting supercars—beating heavy hitters like the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 and the Ford Mustang GT PP2. This year, the Bentayga, F-Pace, Urus, or Cayenne would get its shot at disrupting the field.

Last year the Alfa Romeo Stelvio earned entry in Best Driver’s Car in similar fashion.