The best cars you can buy: coupes

Welcome to Top Gear magazine's round up of The Best Cars In The World. That might seem a trite observation, but after much deliberation, haranguing and three bouts of raised voices, the vehicles we will present to you over the coming week represent the cars that TG magazine would happily recommend to family and best friends, without reservation.

Any of these cars - within their brief - are the best at what they do. They are the TG benchmarks, the class leaders.

There are three loose price points to scale our ambition: an attainable version, an aspiration and a dream.

So, allow us to guide you through the cars you should consider before all else. Today, it's the turn of the coupes...

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As odd as it may seem in our Best Cars celebration, it doesn't take long behind the wheel of the Wraith to work out that this is no mere car.

The view ahead across the acreage of bonnet and the way its prow rises under acceleration is pure powerboat. The blend of analogue and digital inside, amid the finest wood and leather the world's forests and fields can provide, is luxuriously steampunk. Glide down a motorway on-ramp, and the Rolls almost hovers past the rest of the world, like an Art Deco spaceship.

Pictures: Lee Brimble

This feature was originally published in the September 2014 issue of Top Gear magazine

Yes, the corrosive Yewtree whiff of fallen Seventies television celebrity might still hang over the Rolls-Royce brand, but blimey has BMW done a good job of repurposing the Spirit of Ecstasy. It really is in a class of its own for imperious majesty, assuming that's your thing. There's also a 624bhp twin-turbo V12 in the vicinity, but it's so powerfully unobtrusive it's like having an SAS-trained butler at your beck and call.

Mercedes-Benz, of course, tried to conjure similar magic out of Maybach, relaunched via Concorde and the QE2 shortly before Rolls-Royce was reborn with the Phantom in 2003. But they ended up with the cast of Dragons' Den instead of Jay Gatsby, and it's fallen to the S-Class to do the heavy lifting once again. The range is now spread across a variety of versions, long and short, with airline flatbed rear seats, Ottomans, Swarovski crystal headlights, an in-built perfume dispensary and Lord knows what else to tempt the deep-pocketed.

To be honest, for all its superiority, I've long been suspicious of the German car industry's concept of luxury. Well, nobody's perfect, and it's not something you can tackle empirically, either. Can the S63 introduce a classical flourish to the relentless techno beat? Naturally, as the new ‘supreme pinnacle' of the range, it's packed to the gunwales with technology, which will make for an interesting experience, come MOT test time in 2034. Actually, the S Coupe will prove equally interesting in the wilds of Wales in 2014, as we're about to find out.

If the Rolls is the circa £250k car and the Merc the £125k technocrat, then the £60k Jag F-Type Coupe V6S is, relatively speaking, the bargain (not a word generally associated with it till now). It's here not because we're comparing like with like - as random as we can be, TG maths isn't that bad - but because it's arguably the year's most beautiful car. It enters an arena worth a piffling 70,000 sales globally per year, so even if it is a hit it'll do bugger all for Jaguar's bottom line. But that's not the point. It's effectively the new E-type, the car that has haunted Jaguar's every waking moment since 1975. Its curves have curves.

In fact, as I navigate the Wraith into Telford services on the M54 (I had my people phone ahead to organise a welcoming committee), there's a white F-Type Coupe in the car park. There are two blokes beside it, practically falling over themselves to get a better look, and engaging in a prime piece of car-park philosophising. It's precisely the impact this thing was designed to have. It's only when I spot TG office stalwart Rowlesy chowing down on a Burger King 20 feet away that I realise this is our F-Type, which ruins the effect somewhat.

I really, really wanted to meet the person who didn't buy a Porsche Cayman or 911.

At least that means we can swap for the remainder of the run up to north Wales. It's a familiar and dynamically demanding stomping ground, interspersed with roundabouts and lengthy carriageways. That said, while the roads up ahead might suit the Jaguar, they're emphatically not what Rolls-Royce or AMG had in mind when signing off the Wraith or S63. Which, of course, is one of the reasons we're going there and are not on an autobahn to Wiesbaden.

After the mighty Wraith, the F-Type Coupe cannot help but be a comedown. Physically as well as metaphysically: the Rolls is as lofty as a full-size SUV, and the Jag is a proper low-slung sports car. One is dedicated to placing a discrete distance between you and the real world. The other is in your face, and everyone else's.

And what of the build quality differences? On paper, there's a gap of about £170k, which is nonsense in a world riven with inequality. Perhaps the Rolls is even vaguely immoral. And yet... in the Wraith, you might step away believing that it's £231k well spent, such is the forensic attention to detail. In the F-Type, you'll be wondering why it doesn't feel quite as well put together as an Audi TT or BMW 4-Series.

It's certainly snug. Snug bordering on Fat Fighters if you're carrying a bit of extra timber around the middle. It feels like an out-and-out sports car - an aggressive one at that - and you wear it more like a trainer than a brogue. The main dials sit in a simple hooded binnacle, the air vents are flush but rise into action when called upon, and climate control is taken care of by a trio of rotary knobs of questionable haptic feel.

The multimedia display also looks and feels a little tired, some of the detailing isn't up to scratch and the gear-selector suffers from a sticky action. This particular car has a monochrome interior and feels light on inspiration. Others I've driven have felt brighter and tighter overall, so we'll let it go this time.

Lack of integrity is not an issue that afflicts the F-Type Coupe in any other department. Jaguar claims that its body is 80 per cent more rigid than the convertible's, and a stiffness figure of 24,336lb ft per degree makes it one of the most rigid cars ever. You can tell. If you think Jaaaaaaags are still fundamentally languid wingback armchairs with a body and wheels attached, this thing'll blow your mind. Approach a roundabout at even a moderate speed, and the linearity of its hydraulic steering, the way its ZF-supplied 8spd 'box snaps and zaps down through the ratios, and the supreme bite of its brakes, adds up to a monumentally entertaining whole.

With the active exhaust fitted, the F-Type adds sonic icing to the tingle in your fingertips, the pulsing in your feet and the fizzing in your gentleman's area. And, unlike some cars, the F-Type doesn't take its time winning you over. You know you're in the presence of something special 10 seconds after you flatten the pedal for the first time. This is why it's here. For its bestness.

The S63 AMG, on the other hand, rolls into this contest like a Panzer tank specced by Tony Stark. There hasn't been a wholly elegant big Benz coupe since the legendary Paul Bracq's Sixties heyday, but this one gets close. A dramatic descending swage line does it best to fool the eye into thinking that this is not, in fact, a five-metre-long barge. It's also way more than just an S-Class Coupe, although the rear is too amorphous for my taste.

We could debate the exterior aesthetics till the cows come home. Some of them clearly won't be making it, though, because they've ended up in the Merc. This is without doubt the most mentally challenging cabin I've ever sat in, and not because of the quilted Berlin burlesque club red leather on the seats and dash. Two configurable TFT screens dominate your field of vision, and offer up a banquet of sub-menus on which to gorge. There are six swivelling air vents. The satnav features terrain modelling and astonishingly rendered graphics. There are cameras all over the car, and the image relayed to the screen is so clear you can count the blades of grass outside. The Burmester hi-fi has 24 speakers, and is unequivocally the best in-car audio I've ever clapped ears on, not least because the separation is so stunning you can actually tell what the girl is saying at the start of Pink Floyd's ‘Comfortably Numb'.

Which brings me to the AMG's driving dynamics. This is a big, heavy car with a 582bhp twin-turbo V8, so it's obviously rapid. But there are all sorts of rapid on offer here, which makes the S63 a fascinating car to be around. It will settle into the most elegant of cruises, an isolated two-tonne cocoon, but it plays hard, too. Its Magic Body Control uses cameras to scan ahead and adjust the ride accordingly. Factor in its active curve control thingy, which leans the air suspension in the direction of travel, and you have a car that can defy the trickiest undulations of a Welsh B-road as slyly as a Vegas card sharp in a poker game. It's brilliant. There's so much electro-trickery going on that the S63 could well be helpless (or at least a vast handful) without it all engaged - there's too much to list here, and not all of it makes sense. Dunsfold is the place for that voyage of discovery. Who knows, I might like its rubbery steering a bit more there, too.

The arrival of an unmarked Vauxhall Insignia VXR estate - a sure-fire plodmobile - is a further gentle reminder that this car is so suavely fast that it could easily hang your arse out to dry without you even noticing. Not a defence that any judge would wear, as far as I'm aware. Time for some more calming Floyd.

The Wraith soothes all by itself. Now is not the time to point out its resemblance to the Seventies Ford Granada Coupe, but everything else about this wondrous motor car is life-enhancingly unique. You don't shut its vast rear-hinged driver's door, you walk it to the chassis. The main instrument dials are lacquered black on a cream background, and are as perfectly restrained as the Merc's are OTT. An analogue clock defies the TFT revolution. And the wood trim - yards and yards of it - sends that oldest of luxury car tropes to rehab.

The Wraith places an equally old-fashioned emphasis on driving etiquette. If not quite a leviathan, it's certainly a big machine, and that means you must plan ahead like you would in a classic. It sighs along on its air suspension, more of a hustler than seems proper, an accurate, satisfying steer despite the lightness of its set-up, and capable of summoning up huge forward momentum from that quad-cam V12, gobbling air like an organ's bellows. But it's just as alluring as a static object.

There are no losers here, of course. I choose the Merc for the drive down. The sun is sinking, and the Wraith is ahead, a vast galleon filling the S63's windscreen. Behind me, the F-Type's curves are developing extra curves. This has been a very good day indeed, and it's not over yet.

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