Wheels06 Test-Drive: This Year's Models

Ben Kweller is perhaps the pop star least likely to pant for Volkswagen's slick GTI. The singer-songwriter admittedly favors safe, nerdy rides like his gray Volvo, which he bought ten years ago and hasn't had the heart to sell. "She's an old lady of a car," says Kweller, pointing to the sagging four-door parked outside his Brooklyn apartment. "I named her Annabelle."

Yet not even Kweller is immune to this alluringly remade "pocket rocket." With its honeycomb grille, cherry-red brake calipers and huge hatchback, Volkswagen's newest version of its twenty-three-year-old classic more closely resembles a well-fed Audi than a sports compact. "It's a good-looking car," says Kweller. "Hell, yeah. I dig it."

With that, Kweller is off, pointing us toward the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Turning onto the on ramp, he tries to outgun traffic when the car suddenly kicks into high gear, abruptly sending the rear wheels sliding before he rights them with a flick of the three-spoke steering wheel. "Holy crap," he says. "That's some Lethal Weapon stuff right there." Indeed, the car is notoriously twitchy. It's not unusual for the turbocharged 200-horsepower engine to jerk you back as if you're being yanked by the hair.

"We need to find someplace where we can open this thing up," says Kweller with a yawn. It's been an exhausting few months for the singer, between greeting a new baby boy, Dorian, and teaching a recently assembled band all fifty-two of his songs before they hit the road in support of Kweller's new disc. We slip it into the CD changer, and the car's ten speakers boom to life. "This is a good driving song," says Kweller, turning to "Penny on the Train Track," a shiny nugget of Seventies-era pop. "A driving song should mention the landscape. It should make you want to go out cruising."

Today, the expressway's congested landscape proves less than inspiring, so Kweller heads back to Brooklyn. Underneath an elevated subway track, he maneuvers behind a sixteen-wheeler backing into a warehouse. "That was a dumb-ass move, wasn't it?" he says. "If you're going to test-drive a car, you have to see how it is for dumb-ass drivers, too."

Back in front of Kweller's apartment, I ask what he would name the GTI.

"Johnny," he says without hesitation. "Young, fast, good-looking -- it's definitely a Johnny." L.C. SMITH