There's a nameless class of vehicles that roam just about every American road. You'll catch them everywhere from the money-lined streets of Beverly Hills or the endless cityscape of New York to the odometer-turning expanse of Texas and the crumbling pavement of Detroit. These are the cars that blend to most of the population. But to us, enlightened gearheads that we are, they stand out like sore thumbs and give us a tinge of pity when we pass to the left of them.

They're signals that this driver either knows nothing about vehicles or had to make a serious compromise and pull the trigger on any purchase possible just to get behind the wheel. For the lack of a better term, we'll call them Compromise Cars.

Compromise Cars are a class of vehicle that's hard to love without auxiliary life experiences being formed around them simply because they take the joy there is to be had in the act of driving and run it over multiple times. A 1994 Toyota Tercel is easy to fall in love with, but according to Consumer Reports, the Nissan Versa, Dodge Journey, Chevrolet Trax, Acura ILX, Nissan Sentra, and Mercedes-Benz GLA are not. Not many buyers of these transportation pods would make a repeat purchase, which is something our gearhead community could have told them in the first place. The biggest disappointment in this group is the Mercedes GLA.

Our ride in its Infiniti equivalent, the QX30, taught us that Mercedes is setting itself up for failure if it expects that car to be the gateway purchase that'll eventually land a driver in an S-Class. Better luck next generation?