SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES

A QUARTET OF COMPACT FOUR- DOORS FROM THE U.S., EUROPE, AND JAPAN PACK SATISFYING DYNAMICS INTO PRACTICAL PACKAGES, DELIVERING ON THE SPORTS SEDAN'S LONGTIME PROMISE.

- JOE LORIO

HERE WE GO AGAIN, driving sports sedans and untangling some of the finest canyon roads Southern California has to offer. Sports sedans have long been Car and Driver favorites. Former editor David E. Davis Jr’s 1968 ode to the BMW 2002 was a seminal work in celebration of the genre, back when muscle, pony, and sports cars were what captured the imagination. Today, ultraquick EVs, mind-bending hypercars, desert-running pickups, and SUVs of all stripes garner most of the attention, but we're still drawn to the purity and practicality, the aesthetics and the athleticism of this enthusiast-friendly four-door format.

The cars we assembled for this comparison test come from the U.S., Japan, and Germany. Each contender provides genuine performance for an outlay that's not far beyond the current new-car average.

The Acura Integra Type S compact four-door is thematically in line with the sports-sedan ethos, even if its luggage hold is accessed via a hatch and not a trunklid. It starts at $54,095, and with Liquid Carbon Metallic paint ($600) the only extra-cost item, our as-tested total came to $54,695. That made the Acura the least expensive car here. But just barely.

Audi offers its smallest sedan in three strengths: the lease-friendly A3, the pavement-ripping RS3, and, what works out to be the average of the two, the S3 we invited to the test. The S3 has more power for 2025, as its turbocharged 2.0-liter four finds another 22 horses for a total of 328, while torque stays at 295 pound-feet. For 2025, the S3 borrows the RS3's (and Volkswagen Golf R's) torque-vectoring rear differential, which helps the steering achieve the desired direction. The S3 starts at $49,995 but climbs to $56,195 in our top-spec Prestige trim. Our test car added another $4645 in extras, the most significant being the S Sport package ($1100), which brought revised suspension tuning and adaptive dampers, swelling the bottom line to $60,840.