QOTD: Are V6-Engined Midsize Sedans Way Over The Top?

Horsepower doesn’t necessarily cure all that ails you. Potent powertrains aren’t invariably linked to progress. The greater pony count is not unfailingly found under the hood of the greater car.

All too often, auto enthusiasts fall into the trap of believing that a deeply flawed car can be made better if they’d only put a proper engine under the hood. In reality, huge power increases often do more to highlight, rather than mask, a car’s flaws.

The overwhelming majority of 2017’s crop of midsize sedans are not deeply flawed cars, of course. But it’s generally accepted, at least by people like you and me, that they can all be made better by upgrading the basic four-cylinder powerplant with an optional V6. By spending a fair chunk of extra change. By tolerating a sharp increase in fuel consumption. By challenging two front wheels to sometimes fulfill two starkly different missions.

With the Chrysler 200’s death, America’s midsize sedan category now features four cars with front-wheel drive and V6 powerplants. I’m driving one this week: the 2017 Volkswagen Passat 3.6. The other three — Camry, Accord, Altima — are America’s three best-selling midsize cars.

Average horsepower: 274. Average torque: 252 lb-ft. Average curb weight: 3,500 pounds.

Once up to speed, the knack these four cars have for obliterating slow-moving traffic on a two-lane highway is astonishing. And it’s not as though they’re constantly searching for traction or torque steering madly off in all directions, not with a driver who’s aware of the way his or her right foot must mete out throttle pressure.

But is it possible to deny, from a purely objective standpoint, that these cars are hugely overpowered?

There is no middle ground. Honda, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen skipped right past “tasteful enhancement” on their way to “exaggerated augmentation.”

Compared with their four-cylinder siblings, the Accord, Altima, Camry, and Passat produce 50 percent, 51 percent, 51 percent, and 65 percent more horsepower, respectively, in their V6 editions. It’s not so much an upgrade from economy to business class as it is a leap from Piper Cherokee to Learjet 70.

You’re constantly aware that the V6 engine generates a lot of power that you can’t tap into.

Maybe that’s no different from the owner of a 460-horsepower Corvette who knows that mere seconds of throttle application could land him in jail and his car in the impound lot. Maybe it’s not like that at all, since these are not Corvettes.

The Passat, Camry, Accord, and Altima V6s may be the ultimate Q-cars. Sleepers par excellence.

Or they may be cars that took the old idea of 200 sufficient horsepower and just kept on climbing for the fun of it.

Would a torquey turbo-four be more appetizing? Would all-wheel drive make it right? Are base engines the unexpected pièce de résistance?

Or is the fact that these anonymous sedans are chock full of gratuitous energy the very virtue that makes them great?