Why we test millionaires' sports cars

The sports car tire marks barely cooled on tarmac at our test facility when we began receiving e-mails from subscribers annoyed with us for testing eight high-end sports cars such as the Corvette Z06, Dodge Viper, and Porsche 911 in the October 2006 edition of Consumer Reports. (The "Fantasy Sports" report and related reviews are available to online subscribers.) Sure, the collective staff enjoyed experiencing these extreme performance machines, but like all testing, we conducted the analysis to help you, the consumer.

To address the common question, here's why we covered the high-end sports coupes and convertibles:

* Cars in this class make an implicit claim that they are the best in some respects: fastest, sharpest, most luxurious, and so forth. Our job is to test claims like that. And we bring the same skepticism and objectivity to testing fancy cars that we bring to any other product.

* The tests give us--and you--an early look at technology and safety systems that may show up in conventional cars in the near or distant future. Some in this group happened to set new records for us in such key areas as acceleration (Dodge Viper and Corvette Z06) and emergency handling (Porsche 911). Such benchmarks tell us where the performance ceiling is. That information is useful to everyone.

* Premium models are often purchased by consumers with only limited, hands-on experience, due to the vehicles' exclusive nature. With these exotic machines, our test engineers were able to report on the objective performance, as well as the personalities, which often differed from the marketed persona or perceived image.

* While high-end sports cars are important for what we can learn from them, we also didn't want to use up the car-report pages of two issues of Consumer Reports to tell you about them. So we gathered them together and printed the story once.

* Articles like this one are a little like a travelogue. Even if you never plan to visit a place, you might enjoy the documentary.

We'll come back to earth in the December issue with a report on six economical small cars, including the new Honda Fit, Nissan Versa, and Toyota Yaris. They're priced from about $12,000 to $15,000, a fraction of the $60,000 to $100,000 that the sports cars set us back.

--Gordon Hard