Oakland County — Luxury cars are becoming Brookstone gadget stores on wheels. Who needs to drive them? They’re just fun to play with.

Take the 2024 Genesis G90 sitting in my driveway.

With the key in my pocket, I walked up to the Genesis and it rolled out the red carpet. Make that lit carpet. A Genesis logo splashed on the ground in front of the door and the handles moved outward to my waiting hand. Coldwell Banker, do your house tours do this?

I slid into the posh seats, pushed the brake pedal and the door softly closed next to me. Push the door button and it swings back open (sensing the distance to the car next to you, of course). Step out, lightly tap the door handle button and the door swings closed. Show it off to your friends; you’ll be the envy of the neighborhood.

Show-and-tell luxury accessories have been coming fast and furious in recent years. There’s the Tesla Model 3/Y that will follow you like a dog, the Genesis G60 SUV that you can remote parallel park, the GMC Sierra’s Multi-Pro six-way tailgate including a stairway-into-the-bed, the Ram 1500’s mega-screen, the Lincoln Nautilus’s 48-inch pillar-to-pillar display.

The G90 shows off its cutting-edge tech inside a stunning sedan. Remember those? Cadillac and Lincoln long ago exited the big sedan market, so the Genesis is left to compete with icons like the Audi A8, BMW 7-series and Mercedes S-class. In an SUV-mad world, these loooong land yachts remind just how elegant the sedan figure can be.

The G90 debuted back in 2017 as an Audi knock-off and has since matured into its own style. The band’s signature dual lamps are on display — wrapped around  the front end like racing stripes — and are both instantly recognizable as one of the most handsome designs in class. My G90 tester doesn’t come cheap at $100K, but that’s 5 grand south of the comparable BMW 7-series I tested last summer — and showcases classic lines compared to the German’s new techno-punk wardrobe.

Like the Bimmer, the Genesis sports those mesmerizing auto-shut doors — and lots more toys inside. No, our tour still hasn’t got out of the driveway yet.

Fall into the palatial backseat (just press the door button and it silently closes behind you) and slip your shoes off. Press a button on the door and your chair turns into a Barcalounger.

The front passenger seat rolls forward to open up (even more) legroom while the backseat reclines. Out pops a thigh support so your legs can stretch out straight, my 6’5” drumsticks dangling in the air. Ahhhh.

Feeling sleepy? A center screen of controls is at your disposal so you can 1) close the rear sunroof (did I mention there are separate sunroofs for the front and rear passengers?), 2) cover the rear windows with blinds, 3) activate a massage, 4) heat/cool your seats, and 5) put on your favorite tunes (assuming the driver doesn’t mind).

Oh, yes, the driver.

The front thrones are not only beautifully designed (check out the concave steering wheel, flying buttresses bracketing the instrument display and butterfly console doors), but the cockpit can also be customized to your liking. Choose your graphic themes, font size, screen color, head-up display content. Three buttons on the steering wheel can be programmed with shortcuts to your most-used features — I performed mine for preset radio stations, audio mute and AM radio.

While Genesis has come into it own on interior/exterior design, the brand seems determined to give you feature options you might find on other premium brands. The center console screen can be controlled by touch (like an Audi) or by remote rotary dial (like a Bimmer). Radio presets can be swiped though via a Mercedes-like steering-wheel touchpad. And volume and adaptive cruise speed controls are easily manipulated via raised toggles like a Cadillac or GMC.

Speaking of speed, you’ll eventually want to drive the Genesis after ogling its blizzard of features. The experience doesn’t disappoint.

Mash the pedal and the 409-horsepower, twin-turbo V-6 responds with a mighty roar — thrusting you into traffic with impressive velocity (a 48-volt battery provides extra oomph) despite the yacht’s 5,156-pound curb weight. Sixty mph blows by just 5.1 seconds while the all-wheel-drive system provides welcome stability. A SPORT mode is on offer — tightening the seat bolsters around you — but this is no sportscar.

More enjoyable is adaptive cruise control, which automatically changes lanes on interstates. Parent Hyundai has been at the forefront of usable ACC systems, and the Genesis is no exception with lane-keep assist that is excellent for long drives.

I especially appreciated that Genesis had located the rotary shifter to the left of the rotary infotainment controller in the center console. Other Genesis models stack them, which can bring confusion — I’ve been caught out shifting the sister GV80 SUV into neutral, for example, when I though I was rotating between radio stations. Ugh.

Other ergonomics  still need tidying, however. For all its technical wizardry, G90 still requires a cable to operate Apple CarPlay and Android auto — cluttering the console. The dreaded STOP-START switch is in the nether regions of the left dash rather than right next to the ignition button as in BMW and Mercedes.

It’s hard to be mad, though, when you have so many goodies at your fingertips.

The 2024 Genesis G90 shows off sleek proportions and fancy 21-inch wheels. Henry Payne, The Detroit News

I thrilled at the authoritative roar of the V-6 under my whip, but otherwise the cabin was whisper quiet during my week of cruising. Mrs. Payne and I conversed easily. In a sudden March blizzard, the all-wheel-drive system was unfazed and confident in the slippery conditions. Alas, that 48-volt battery cramps the cargo sub-space, meaning no spare tire should a tread come to grief.

Genesis competes with Bimmer and Merc with its 6-cylinder powertrain. The Germans up the ante to V-8s in their top-line models. Genesis is content to offer a 375-horse V-6 and the (48-bolt assisted) 409-horse mill in my tester.

After a haircut, my barber was keen to take a tour. She slipped into the driver’s seat, then beamed when the door closed at her press of the brake pedal.

I’m going to have to start charging for these tours.

Next week: 2024 Acura ZDX

2024 Genesis G90

Vehicle type: Gas-powered, all-wheel drive, five-passenger luxury sedan

Price: $90,450, including $1,195 destination charge ($100,695 e-Supercharged model as tested)

Powerplant: 3.5-liter, twin-turbocharged V-6

Transmission: Eight-speed automatic

Weight: 5,156 pounds

Power: 375 horsepower, 391 oound-feet torque (base); 409 horsepower, 405 pound-feet torque (e-Supercharged)

Performance: 0-60 mph, 5.1 seconds (Car and Driver); top speed, 132 mph

Fuel economy: EPA est. 17 city/24 highway/20 combined (as tested)

Report card

Highs: Tech-tastic; handsome design

Lows: Wireless Apple CarPlay, please; gets pricey

Overall: 3 stars

Henry Payne is auto critic for The Detroit News. Find him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or @HenryEPayne.

Miami — The circus is in town. My 6’9” media colleague Brian Armstead and I emerged from our wee Fiat 500e to stares in downtown Miami.

Dude, you’re 6’5”, how do you two fit in a Flea-at?

Quite comfortably, thanks for asking. With a tall roof, peppy electric motor and plenty of room to splay our legs where the driveline used to be, the 500e is a modern clown car. Fiat has it right. Big brands are falling all over themselves these days to sell mainstream buyers on electric cars. But electrics are niche vehicles for premium shoppers. Tesla Model 3/Y is for techies, Mustang Mach-E for pony car enthusiasts, Hummer EV for off-roaders.

Fiat 500e is for fun.

The wee hatchback might as well have a key chain link on it. This is one adorable accessory. Dressed in red, the cheerful clown scurried through the streets with big LED eyes and a fashionable electric motor under the hood. What, no red nose?

Of course, fashion these days attracts politics, and the Fiat is perfumed with a marketing campaign promising to save the world. Cloying climate celebrities Bono and Jennifer Lopez have added their names to the circus, and I can’t think of anything more tiresome than dinner with jet-setting millionaire musicians lecturing Americans on how to save polar bears.

Ditch them at their private airport and take the 500e for a spin around the Big Top. This clown car is a treat.

Designed for metropolitan streets, our red 500e tester squirted out of stoplights in downtown Miami, its electric motor smooth as an Atlantic breeze. At 20 mph, external music composed by Italian composers Flavio Ibba and Marco Gualdi played to alert pedestrians it was coming. Seriously! Back up, and an electronic safety alert hums. Miami Nice.

With a single-speed electric transmission, the Italian is easy to drive. Heck, you don’t even need to use your left foot. Select SHERPA mode and use the motor for regenerative braking.

At an A1A intersection on South Beach, I executed a U-turn on a dime. Zoot! Thirty miles an hour went by in 3 seconds, making intersections a breeze to cross. Refreshingly, Fiat doesn’t strain to advertise the car’s long distance driving abilities (ICEs embarrass EVs on refueling time). The pup will scamper around metro neighborhoods for up to 160 miles in SHERPA mode (149 miles in RANGE mode) before its tongue hangs out.

“Put it in the garage next to your Jeep Grand Cherokee gas car,” says Fiat North American Chief Aamir Ahmed (nice plug for another Stellantis brand there). I drove 140 miles from Naples to Miami and back this year in a gas sedan, a task that would be painful in a 500e. Ditto Detroit to Grand Rapids. Take the Jeep, not the Fiat.

This is a toy like a sportscar or an off-road Wrangler. Niches are nice — why does every vehicle have to be a commodity? An electric toaster?

The iconic shape of the 2024 Fiat 500e. Henry Payne, The Detroit News

The 500 earns its distinction thanks to decades of brand polishing. Sure, the Italian is a healthy 10 grand north of a comparable subcompact Hyundai Venue, but the Fiat oozes la dolce vita with its big peepers, 17-inch wheels and Easter egg shape. There are few cars as recognizable as the 500. Think VW Bug, Ford Mustang, Porsche 911, Land Rover Defender, Mazda Miata. Icons all — and all aimed at niche buyers.

The Fiat is one of a handful starting at $40K-or-below in an EV class with its natural competitor being another icon, the $32K Mini Cooper Electric. Others to consider: Tesla’s 40-grand Model 3 and Volvo’s $36K Tesla-esque EX30 EV.

Tesla is king given its superior range (for that Naples or Grand Rapids trip) and superior tech (it can park itself as well as do neat Summon tricks). But the Fiat’s happy clown face always seems to be smiling compared to the Tesla’s smartphone vibe.

For $37,595, the 500e Beauty and Music models also match the Tesla with adaptive cruise control and blind-spot assist. Tellingly, my entry level $34K Red tester (in addition to its hard plastic interior) is not equipped with these urban essentials so Fiat can remain in the black. Yet another EV challenge, though the feds aim to make the Fiat more affordable with a whopping $7,500 tax credit if leased (the Fiat’s Italian assembly makes it ineligible for the $7,500 purchase subsidy. Go figure).

Red’s cabin is otherwise state-of-the-art with wireless charging, wireless Apple CarPlay/Android Auto, volume/radio station controls on the back of the steering wheel, Alexa connectivity and Stellantis’s best-in-biz Uconnect 5 infotainment software. The rear seats will fit small adults and the hatchback makes for usable cargo storage, especially with the rear seats collapsed.

Buyers in big cities will, of course, enjoy maneuvering their 500e in tight apartment garages. For those folks, Fiat’s $600 credit for a 240-volt wall charger makes little sense (especially as apartment buildings balk at the expense of installing their own chargers), so use the credit on Stellantis’s Free2Move app, locate area fast chargers, and plan a meal each week around charging the car.  The Fiat will drink a quick 30 miles of electrons in 5 minutes when needed.

Not your thing? It’s a niche, not a necessity.

Fiat would do the 500e a favor by offering a soft-top version at some point (that way seven-footers could stick their necks out the top). The soft top has been a signature of the Italian meatball over its 63-year history and would fill a disappearing market in the United States. Open-air models like the Camaro convertible, Toyota Solara and Buick Cascada have all disappeared in recent years.

Cruising with the windows down on Route 1 — the East Coast’s Woodward Avenue — on the way back into Miami, Brian cranked up his Pandora playlist through the car’s speakers. Miami is a car town like Motown, and we mingled with other icons on the route: Mustang convertible, Lamborghini Huracan, door-less Wrangler.

The 500e follows in the footsteps of 1957-vintage grandfather 500, a clown car with its engine hanging out the back and a similar urban mission. Take it on the highways and its 13 horsepower would take a week to reach its 53-mph top speed — if it didn’t get stomped by a truck first.

Today’s 94-mph 500e is not meant for road trips, either. But if you’re looking for a daily smile, it might be the fashion fit for your keychain.

Next week: 2024 Genesis G90

2024 Fiat 500e

Vehicle type: Electric, front-wheel drive, four-passenger coupe

Price: $34,095, including $1,595 destination charge (as tested)

Powerplant: 40-kWh lithium-ion battery with front electric motor drive

Transmission: Single-speed transmission

Weight: 2,952 pounds

Power: 117 horsepower, 162 pound-feet of torque

Performance: 0-60 mph, 8.5 seconds (mfr.); top speed, 94 mph

Fuel economy: EPA est. range, 149 miles

Report card

Highs: Iconic looks; fun day at the circus

Lows: Specific metro use case; pricey for a subcompact

Overall: 3 stars

Henry Payne is auto critic for The Detroit News. Find him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or @HenryEPayne

Naples, Florida — My Chevy Malibu is roomy, techy and easy on the eyes. And, most importantly, it’s a used bargain at under 20 grand.

Let’s go used car reviewing.

I’m a big fan of affordable cars whether new or used, but it’s a tough hoe for consumers these days in a market buffeted by a perfect storm of electric vehicle mandates, low post-pandemic inventories, and high manufacturing costs. The average price paid for a new vehicle has ballooned from $37,577 in 2019 to $47,338 now. Worse, the number of new cars under $20,000 has shrunk as manufacturers buffeted by rising regulation, labor costs and electronic tech find it hard to make margin on entry-level cars — driving customers into the used market, where inventories have been hammered by the lack of production during the pandemic.

“We need more used cars,” Roger Penske lamented to me in a recent interview as he listed the challenges to his dealer network.

The average price of a used vehicle — $27,297 as of last month — is up even more than new cars (33% vs. 26%) from $20,398 in 2019. Ouch. Meanwhile, affordable new cars like the Honda Fit, Chevy Sonic and Ford Focus have left the market. Manufacturers are flooding the zone instead with EVs to both meet onerous government sales mandates and to test consumer taste for battery-power. Most of the new cars I test these days are pricey electrics like the $50K Chevy Blazer EV. To make up for big losses on EVs (Ford lost $4.7 billion in its EV division last year), brands are making higher-trim models to capture profit.

Meanwhile, customers want gas-powered Swiss Army knives — affordable vehicles that can do it all from road trips to urban parking to loading in a family of four.

As I travel the country, I’ll try to report on good finds from time to time. The Chevy Malibu is one.

Sneak up behind my Malibu 1LT tester in a parking lot and you might mistake its sleek lines for a luxury chariot. Coupe-like roof, scalloped side panels, fashionably-spoked wheels. Walk ‘round to the front and the mood is ruined by a dog’s breakfast of twin grilles and competing surfaces. Give me a simple, European grille any day.

I have a friend who’s a big Lexus fan but recoils at their Darth Vader grilles. So she just parks the car head-first into her garage or downtown parking spot so she never has to look at it. Happily, when you’re behind the wheel of the Malibu, you never have to look it in the face.

Instead, you get a handsome, ergonomically-superior interior. Easy-to-read tablet screen, well-organized, bezeled climate controls, fat knobs for controlling climate and sound, intuitive automotive shifter. Alas, the steering wheel of my 2023 tester didn’t have Chevy’s newer roller button for volume and cruise control — but I could still find the raised control buttons with my fingers so I never had to take my eyes off the road.

Better yet, Malibu allowed me to control the radio from the back of the steering wheel. Volume buttons on the wheel’s right backside. Station controls on the left.

I rented my ‘bu tester in Naples, Florida — which is hardly New York City — but is still jammed with traffic in the winter months with everything from spring breakers to senior citizens to hot rodders with more horsepower than sense.

Navigating this morass in the Malibu is also easy thanks to wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto — a significant upgrade to the Chevy since its 2016 debut — which mirrors your phone’s navi system for seamless, familiar operation. I gave voice commands without ever taking my phone out of my pocket.

“Hey, Google, navigate to Miami!”

The direction dutifully followed on screen.

The rear seats of the 2023 Chevy Malibu 1LT offer good legroom for tall folks. Henry Payne, The Detroit News

Add to this convenience a lack of range anxiety. I love electric vehicles, but you need to be conscious of range at all times. Recharging takes time, and could make you late for an appointment — or take you out of your way, especially in unfamiliar territory (to me) like South Florida. Gas power = peace of mind.

After a morning of errands, Mrs. Payne and I set off for Miami (to look at buying a used Alfa Romeo 4C — a used car for another column), at which point I finally took a look at my fuel gauge: just 118 miles left for the 240-mile round trip. We’d need fuel to get there and back. No worries.

I drove into one of the numerous service stations on Naples’ perimeter, added 328 miles in a minute and was set for the day. Try that in a $100,000, 800-volt, Porsche Taycan Turbo and you’ll get 245 miles in 16 minutes at an Electrify America fast charger (according to a recent Inside EVs test). Who would think a Malibu costing 1/5^th that of a Taycan would be faster at anything?

Merging onto I-75 east to Miami, I floored the 1.5-liter turbo-4 under the hood, which let out a nice growl. Then I set cruise control at 80 mph. I’d prefer adaptive cruise, but that’s not available on ’23 1LTs. Preferences vary depending on automaker — but I’d recommend a used car today with at least two of three electronic advances: wireless Android Auto/Apple CarPlay, adaptive cruise, and … blind-spot assist.

The latter is standard on the ’23 Malibu, so I didn’t have to crane my neck to check traffic every time I wanted to pass a slower car. Were I alone, I might have listened to a Spotify on Android Auto, but Mrs. Payne and I passed the time chatting in the quiet cabin.

Had we been passengers in the backseat, we’d have been comfortable. The advantage of a midsizer like Malibu is its good rear legroom. Also excellent is the Chevy’s JD Power quality rating, a key consideration of any buyer.

Malibu scores an 85, beating competitors like the much-loved Subaru Legacy (81).

With front-wheel drive, the Malibu won’t tempt you to conquer Mt. Rushmore in a snowstorm like the AWD Legacy. But the Chevy sedan will do just fine in all seasons, deliver an easy-on-the-wallet 32 mpg and 540 miles of highway range — and won’t beg the premium price of a comparable Subie.

My rule of thumb is to buy used vehicles with 50,000 miles or less on them, and that have a good service history. There’ll be a Malibu for you there — though you may have to go to Florida to find it.

As the industry goes all-electric, used gas vehicles could be in more demand than ever.

Next week: 2025 Fiat 500e

2023 Used Chevy Malibu

Vehicle type: Front-engine, front-wheel-drive, four-door sedan

Price: $27,895 when new, including $1,500 destination charge (under $20,000 used 1LT)

Powerplant: 1.5-liter turbocharged inline-4 cylinder

Power: 160 horsepower, 184 pound-feet-torque

Transmission: Continuously variable automatic

Performance: 0-60 mph, 7.8 seconds (Car and Driver); Top speed, 130 mph

Weight: 3,184 pounds

Fuel economy: EPA est. 29 mpg city/36 highway/32 combined

Report card

Highs: Easy to use; easy on the wallet

Lows: No adaptive cruise control; oh, that face

Overall: 3 stars

Henry Payne is auto critic for The Detroit News. Find him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or @HenryEPayne.