We agreed to go test-drive a couple of vehicles today. We know that we're going to buy a new car sometime this year, and my preference is for a Jetta. However, we didn't know how the different engines compared to each other, so we decided to go drive one of each today.

The first car, the four-cylinder, was acceptable, certainly—the engine fired up faster than the four unionized hamsters that run my current car. But it whined a bit when I pushed it to highway speed, and it was working harder than either of us would have liked. We turned around and brought it back.

I thought I had a handle on things; I had an idea of how touchy the brake and accelerator were, and felt fairly confident when I got behind the wheel of the six-cylinder version. Since the car was almost out of gas, the salesguy had to ride along with us to the gas station.