Car and Driver 2008 10 Best cars

as a 2002 ES300 owner, I can understand the exclusion...I'm just waitng for the day this transmission falls out the bottom, after all the hard shifting and hunting that it has done in its lifetime...

Mind you, I've stopped recommending the ES even for those who wanted a dolled-up Camry because of cheesy powertrains. (Some owners don't realize that ES is basically a Camry with different sheet metals.)

The newer Toyota U-series transmissions unfortunately aren't the best on the lot. The preferred transmissions these days are the Borg Warner Direct Shift Gearbox designs (Direkt Schalt Getriebe -- Audi and Porsche are working on their own versions, like the Porsche Doppel Kupplungs). These are fuel efficient, high performance transmissions allowing excellent manual controls -- upshifts in as little as 8 ms, compared to the Toyota/Aisin clunkers (0.1 sec shifts).

I'll alert the media.