Lexus
There’s just something about the coupe body style that works. There’s a sense of purpose to it, something that sort of telepathically beams visions of sunset blasts up California’s Highway 1 or letting it loose on an empty stretch of forgotten desert highway. It’s no surprise that most of history’s most desirable cars have been coupes and most of today’s most desirable cars are still coupes. Which ones are the best, though? I’m here to help answer that very question.
Of course, getting to the bottom of which are the best coupes in 2024 will require some serious specificity. By that I mean we need to narrow down which coupes are best at what role, because is it fair to compare a Bentley Continental GT Speed to a Porsche 911 GT3? Not really, because while they share a vaguely similar body plan, they have very different jobs. With that in mind, let’s get to it.
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Best Performance Coupe Under $100,000: BMW M4 Competition
Image Credit: Enes Kucevic Photography The current-generation BMW M4 is by no means a great beauty, and it’s anything but subtle. What it is, however, is brutal. It will do 0-60 mph in under four seconds, offers driving dynamics that punch way above its $83,200 starting price, and is a jewel of a 3.0-liter turbocharged inline-six that puts out a whopping 523 horsepower to the rear wheels. Hell, you can even get it with all-wheel drive if you want and it drops another 0.4 seconds from the 0-60 time.
BMW M cars may no longer be the pared-down, simple, and raw driver’s cars they once were, but the engineers in Munich clearly still know what they’re doing.
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Runner-Up: Ford Mustang Dark Horse
Image Credit: Ford Yeah, it’s got a goofy name but the highest-performance Mustang you can buy today is no laughing matter. It’s packing a 500-horsepower naturally aspirated V8 with an available manual transmission. You can get it with huge, sticky tires and Magneride suspension. You can even delete all the super dorky stickers and stripes. It’s expensive for a Mustang with a starting price of just over $63,000, but it’s still one hell of a performance bargain.
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Best Track-Focused Coupe: Porsche 911 S/T
Image Credit: Porsche The S/T might seem like an odd choice for best track-focused coupe when the GT3 RS exists, but while the RS may be the lap-time-at-all-costs member of the 911 family, the S/T offers a more engaging drive and a teensy bit of practicality should you want to use it as, y’know, a car.
The S/T, for the uninitiated, is the lightest 911 you can buy and it comes with the GT3 RS’ naturally aspirated 4.0-liter, 9,000 RPM flat-six that produces 518 horsepower and is paired with arguably one of the best manual transmissions on offer today – the GT specific six-speed manual. The S/T’s weight reduction comes courtesy of a whole lot of sound deadening material being omitted, which means you hear and feel every one of those 9,000 shrieking rpms. Add in a brilliant chassis, epic brakes, a great interior and truly stellar build quality and you start to see where I’m coming from, even if it does cost $290,000.
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Runner-Up: Aston Martin Valiant
Image Credit: Aston Martin Aston Martin doesn’t really make hardcore track versions of its coupes, not regularly anyway, but if you have enough money and enough pull with the company, maybe they’ll bend the rules for you. This was the case with the Valiant which started life when Fernando Alonso spent some time behind the wheel of the Valour coupe but found it too heavy and not playful enough. To fix those issues, Aston gave the Valiant a manual transmission and started throwing exotic materials at it like a full carbon body and magnesium wheels.
The resulting 734-hp coupe is hyper-aggressive looking and unbelievably desirable, though unless you have a few million dollars and a time machine laying around, you can’t have one.
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Best Grand Touring Coupe: Bentley Continental GT Speed
Image Credit: Bentley The term “Gentleman’s Express” is sometimes used to describe great Bentleys of the past and that phrase most certainly applies to the just-facelifted Conti GT Speed. While at first glance, the omission of the turbocharged W12 engine may seem like a downgrade, the 782-horsepower hybrid 4.0-liter V8 makes considerably more power while being much more efficient.
The rest of the Bentley hallmarks are present in the new Conti as well: limitless configuration options, exquisite materials, incredible comfort and a heaping helping of exclusivity.
The Continental GT was created to eat transcontinental drives for breakfast – hell, it’s right in the name – and you’d be hard pressed to find something more comfortable and competent to make that trip in than the big coupe from Crewe.
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Runner-Up: Mercedes-AMG GT 63
Image Credit: Mercedes The AMG GT 63 Coupe might seem like a weird choice for second-best grand touring coupe but hear me out. The GT is now based on the same platform as the SL which means it’s bigger, heavier, softer and all-wheel drive only. It’s like the modern day CL63, only better looking. It has a huge cargo compartment under its hatchback, too. Oh, and don’t forget the 4.0-liter, twin turbo V8 that, in this trim, produces 577 horsepower. That’s plenty to quickly blast from LA to Vegas or New York to Maine.
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Best V12-Powered Coupe: Ferrari 12Cilindri
Image Credit: Ferrari Sure, Ferrari isn’t great at naming things but it has never and likely will never suck at making utterly-reality-breaking 12-cylinder engines and then shoving them into deeply weird-looking but ridiculously competent and technologically advanced chassis. I mean, the folks from Modena essentially created the formula and so far nobody has managed to beat them at their own game.
Take the 12Cilindri, aka the replacement for the 812, which packs a 6.5-liter naturally aspirated V12 that makes an almost unreasonable 819 horsepower. This engine is a work of art and along with its eight-speed dual-clutch gearbox, makes the 12Cilindri capable of 2.9-second 0-60 run. That this engine lives in a car that looks like the unwanted lovechild of a 365 GTB Daytona and a Robocop toy you got from Wish.com is almost immaterial. Nothing else does what this car does and for that reason alone, it’s on the list.
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Runner-Up: Aston Martin DBS
Image Credit: Aston Martin 12-cylinder cars in general are becoming rarer than panda pregnancies these days, but of the tiny handful of brands soldiering on, Aston Martin makes some of the prettiest. There’s no arguing that the DBS is pretty long in the tooth at this point, but there is still nothing that looks like it and in 770 Ultimate form, there isn’t much that can keep up with it over long distances. It’s hard to say how long Aston will keep the 12-cylinder flame alive, but at least we can enjoy the DBS while we have it.
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Best Coupe SUV: Porsche Cayenne Turbo E-Hybrid Coupe
Image Credit: Porsche SUV coupes are here to stay whether you like them or not, and while the success of their styling varies greatly from model to model, when it comes to technology and performance, one clearly reigns supreme: The Cayenne Turbo E-Hybrid Coupe.
The Cayenne Turbo E-Hybrid Coupe is a 715-horsepower plug-in-hybrid with a turbocharged 4.0-liter V8 engine and a chassis that allows it to do things that shouldn’t be possible with a curb weight of 5,664 pounds and 7.8 inches of ground clearance. It’s quiet and refined when you want it to be and then it becomes an absolute animal that would be just as happy on a race track as it is trying to find a spot in a Trader Joe’s parking lot.
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Runner-Up: Lamborghini Urus Performante
Image Credit: Lamborghini The Urus Performante is pretty much your only reasonable option if you have to have an all-Lamborghini fleet but you also have to occasionally take more than one person somewhere or go to Costco. It’s also hellaciously quick, makes excellent noises, and is packed with enough artificial suede to an artificial bull. Sure, the styling is comically aggressive and it’s a terrible value proposition compared to other vehicles built on its shared platform, but there’s still something so inherently Italian about it, that you sort of don’t care about any of that when you’re behind the wheel.
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Best Luxury Coupe: Rolls-Royce Spectre
Image Credit: Rolls-Royce Back in the day, one of Rolls-Royce’s most famous and long-running ads stated that “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.” That was impressive and subtly made a statement on how the Rolls was to be best enjoyed: with a sense of detachment and serenity unavailable in any other motor car. Well, now there’s an electric Rolls and it embodies the final form of that ad.
The Specter is so utterly and completely unconcerned with what any other EV is doing. It doesn’t have the best range or the fastest charging speeds. It’s not the quickest or fastest. It’s got exactly as much range and performance as Rolls-Royce customers need. They don’t have to worry about charging, because they have people for that. They don’t need to worry about speed because nothing starts until they get there. It’s soft and silent, infinitely customizable, and absolutely spectacular.
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Runner-Up: Lexus LC 500
Image Credit: Lexus Lexus tends to do luxury cars right. It doesn’t mess around with trying to make them comfortable and refined only to then ruin them with a half-hearted attempt at making them quick around a track. It just focuses on a core idea and then ruthlessly engineers it and builds it better than just about any other company. The Lexus LC 500 is very much an example of this. The LC has the feel of a handbuilt car, with incredible materials everywhere and a sense of solidity and quality that few other companies could even attempt to aspire to. It has a beloved naturally aspirated V8 engine and gorgeous, but somehow still understated styling. It’s one hell of a luxury coupe.
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Best Electric Coupe: Maserati GranTurismo Folgore
Image Credit: LORENZO MARCINNO Maserati’s recently reimagined GranTurismo is pretty cool. It looks almost exactly like the old one, which is good, because that car is one of the best looking wheeled vehicles to come out in the last 30 years. It’s quick thanks to the in-house Nettuno V6 which unfortunately doesn’t sound that great, but that’s ok because the Folgore doesn’t have a V6. It doesn’t have an engine, because it’s electric.
The GranTurismo Folgore has three electric motors producing a combined 761 horsepower and 996 pound-feet of torque, which means that it should fairly handily melt your face off when you mash the accelerator. Even better is that once you’re done trying to break the sound barrier, you will be whisked along in near-silence, coddled in the finest Italian leather, and enjoying your Sonus Faber stereo system. This seems like it has the potential to be the best roadgoing Maserati ever and that has me very excited.
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Runner-Up: Cadillac Celestiq
Image Credit: Cadillac The idea of a $300,000 Cadillac takes some getting used to, and frankly would have been laughable a few years ago, but once you see the Celestiq up close, it all starts to make sense. Everything about the Celestiq was designed to be exceptional. It’s exceptionally long, exceptionally expensive, exceptionally exclusive, and exceptionally cool. With around 600 horsepower and a range of around 300 miles, it’s not going to win any major accolades, but like the Specter, it just doesn’t care.
