The $30,000 to $40,000 sedan market is plump, reeking of leather, quality plastics, and the fast-food detritus of a white-collar commuting schedule. It yields us daily drivers for buyers who want it all—style, comfort, utility, and speed—without defaulting on their variable-rate mortgage payments.

Times have changed. Early sports sedans, whose expression of athleticism was more lateral than longitudinal, considered comfort a subordinate priority. We won’t attempt to nominate the primogenitor of the sports sedan, but tell us what you think in the forums. Certainly mid-1950s Alfa sedans get a nod, with DOHC engines, modest curb weights, and tossability that translated to racing wins. About the same time, Jaguar installed disc brakes and an independent rear suspension on its smallest saloon, the 3.4-liter Mark 1. By the 1960s, the market featured Ford Lotus Cortinas; the BMW 1800, 2000, and later the six-cylinder sedans; the venerable Datsun 510; and the V-8-powered Chevy II. Today’s buyers can indeed have it all, and all the sedans on our list arrive at 60 mph in about half the time of these spiritual predecessors.

BMW gets the kudos, if not for creating the sports sedan segment, then for defining it, both decades ago and today. Enter the Japanese in the late ‘80s, declaring “we’ll give you four-door performance and reliability, so tell BMW where it can stick those $653.00 spark plug wires.” This has proven a successful strategy, and ensured the health of the upmarket Acura, Infiniti, and Lexus brands, all of which are represented here.

There are cheaper sedans that are quicker than the machines here, cars which we discussed in our "Quickest Cars of 2007: $25,000 to $30,000" feature. And before you write in, we know about the couple of seriously fast front-wheel-drive American beef burners not here, but they missed the cut by virtue of being too cheap. We’ll examine that group later. Other notable absentees include the Saab 9-3, which we didn’t include because we won’t be able to get our hands on the 280-horsepower all-wheel-drive V-6 until spring of 2008; and the Subaru WRX STI, which is only available as a five-door hatchback as of 2008.

We have quite an international assortment of vehicles, with four Nipponese, three Germans, and three Americans, two of which are based on a German chassis. The powertrain mix is just as variegated with four-, six-, and eight-cylinder engines employing natural aspiration, single, and twin turbochargers.

For our uses, coupes have two doors and sedans have four, regardless of what Mercedes-Benz CLS and BMW X6 zealots say. The cars on this list tend to be rather well sorted, built to properly manage serious speed with well-studied brakes and suspension setups, but for the purposes of this comparison, we don’t require that they do anything more than roar bat**** up an onramp. In order of descending 0-to-60 times, here are the quickest family sedans between $30,000 and $40,000.