Ahh, summer. Time to get out on the road and drive awhile, to go cruisin' with the top down. America's love affair with the automobile is best appreciated this time of year, and there's nothing quite like doing some of that motoring in an American-built muscle car. Today's modern high-performance machines are every bit as fast as the legendary muscle cars that date back to the 1960s -- except that our '90s counterparts have many more creature comforts, and they happen to stop and turn as well as they go fast in a straight line.

So, as the perfect way to top off our summer, we decided to offer you head-to-head comparisons for eight of the best-performing production vehicles built in North America. To start things off, we chose the granddaddy of all muscle-nameplate rivalries, the Chevy Camaro vs. Ford's Mustang. Naturally, we opted for the 320-horsepower, forced-air induction Z28 SS to represent Chevrolet. But because Ford is having a problem with its SVT Cobra motors this year, none were available for our test. So the 260-horse Mustang GT was sent in to take on the battle with the SS -- with some very surprising results.

For Round Two, we decided to put the new kid on the block, the American-built, 240-horespower BMW M Coupe, up against one of the most famous nameplates in American muscle-car history, Chevy's Corvette. Find out if the stout little German coupe can out-finesse a hardtop Vette with a 105-horsepower advantage. And Round Three pits the fastest General Motors F-Body against the fastest factory Ford. A stripper Pontiac Firebird Formula WS6, equipped with Ram Air and a six-speed manual, goes up against the supercharged SVT F-150 Lightning. That's a truck, you say? Yep, but with its 360 huffy horses underhood it's also the fastest Ford you can buy for quarter-mile sprints, so it makes for an interesting study in contrasts with the flared-nostril Firebird.

Finally, we finished up our comparo with a duel between a pair of sizzling front-drive sedans, the supercharged 240-horse Pontiac Grand Prix GTP and Chrysler's red-hot 253-horse 300M. We had a slight problem in that the folks at DaimlerChrysler said all the 300Ms in their press fleet were booked for the week we would be needing one for our test. So we simply went to Budget and rented a 300M for this test. We wanted to find out if the GTP -- the closest descendent to America's original muscle car, the Pontiac GTO -- would prove as sporting as the much-heralded 300M -- Chrysler's reborn "Letter Series" performance legend. To find out the answer to this and a host of other performance questions, we put all eight cars through their paces at California's Willow Springs International Motorsports Park, as well as subjecting them to the twists and turns of some specially chosen, two-lane canyon roads north of Los Angeles.

In true Edmunds.com fashion, we looked beyond the marketing hype, racetrack chest-thumping and buff-book hyperbole. Instead, we took the time to dig deep and unearth a gold mine of insight into how modern-day muscle cars can be expected to function in the real world. So hop in, buckle up ... and hang on!