The current Honda Prelude has been around for a few years but it has plenty of power, excellent road manners, and gets reasonable fuel economy. If Prelude is a little too expensive, take a look at our other Best Buy the Volkswagen New Beetle. It offers interesting styling and a nice mix of comfort, performance, and economy.

If raw performance is what you are after we Recommend the Chevrolet Camaro, Ford Mustang, and Pontiac Firebird. Not as pleasant to live with on a daily basis, these cars offer a lot of bang for your buck. New last year, the fun-to-drive Toyota Celica also earns the Recommended nod with its reputation for reliability.

This performance icon passes into history after the 2002 models and too many years of underperforming on the sales charts. Sister Chevrolet Camaro dies at the same time. Interestingly, Firebird enjoyed a modest 6-percent year-to-year sales spurt for calendar 1999, only to fall back 8.4 percent in 2000 to just over 31,000. Camaro managed about 42,000 last year. At those levels, General Motors' accountants can't justify continuing either car, let alone a complete redesign. Quite simply, the performance-car action has long since moved from burly iron like Firebird to sporty subcompacts like the Honda Civic Si and Ford Focus ZX3. Only Ford's still-popular Mustang seems able to survive as a traditional Detroit "ponycar."

Speaking of tradition, Pontiac is almost sure to mark Firebird's farewell with a limited-edition "instant collectible," one of the oldest marketing ploys in the book. Chevy is bound to do likewise with Camaro. In each case, the goodbye model is likely to amount to little more than a pricey option package, and mostly cosmetic at that, so beware. Historically, such cars aren't worth any more down the road than their less special siblings, even though fewer may have been built to begin with.