If you need to get away in a ship that steers like a star, this is your car.

All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” So wrote the poet John Masefield, and we get it, the urge to depart, to swiftly kiss off in a vehicle built to go places. All we want is an enthralling ship and a good rack-and-pinion to steer her by. Is that too much to ask? For some car companies, yes.

However, this trio more or less gets it. Handed the key to the Audi A4 or the BMW 2-series or the new Jaguar XE—any of their versions, by the way—you can happily chase horizons for as long as the money supports your vagrant gypsy lifestyle. Yes, in order to produce a 10Best winner from this class, we had to cut the holes in our filter extremely fine. Which is a true statement about many segments these days. Cars are indeed demanding more and more gold, but they’re also getting better and better. As evidence, we give you Audi and Jaguar, both challengers to BMW’s longstanding domination of the compact-sports-sedan genre, but both at vastly different stages of their journeys.

This year, 10Best again proved that there are some nice cars to choose from if you’ve budgeted $40,000 to $50,000, but few are as entertaining as BMW’s top 2-series models, with their combination of humble size; pouncing, liquid thrust from the optional six pots; and piano-­wire tension to the controls. You can see why we picked the M235i last year, but the world keeps turning. The 2-series lineup gets new monikers: The 230i replaces the 228i as the base four-cylinder; the M235i becomes the M240i; and now there’s the juiced M2, basically an M240i with flares, chairs, tires, brakes, and a suspension tune, plus another 30 horsepower (though it can only match the M240i’s torque with a time-limited overboost function).

Meanwhile, fresh new sheetmetal from elsewhere is chasing the sports-sedan dollar. Another writer, Mark Twain, said cauliflower is just cabbage with a college education. For many years, an Audi could be dismissed as just a Volkswagen with a Ph.D. But more than two decades after VW lit Audi’s fire with a deluge of investment in technology and design, a formidable new A4 2.0T sat on our Week Two ballots, attached to a brand with real momentum.

Jaguar is the newcomer, having been set free by Ford in 2008 to float downstream like Moses in the basket and into the caring embrace of India’s Tata conglomerate. Under Ford, Jaguar was never able to effectively break into the under-$50,000 market where all the action was happening. For Brits, waking up after the Brexit vote must have taken them back to the day they woke up to find an X-type parked in the driveway. Lots of precious time was lost while Jaguar continued to gasp on the sales of its expensive ingots of tweedy British snobbery, steadfastly refusing to take seriously the youth movement in the luxury market that was passing it by.

Jaguar strives to give buyers choice in its first real compact sports sedan, the XE. There are three engines, including a diesel; the option of rear- or all-wheel drive; and a variety of trim levels and options that start in the heart of the market at $35,895 and range up to the snorty R-Sport, the prices easily jumping back over the $50,000 mark where Jag has always seemed more comfortable.

“THE M2 IS WHAT THE M3 USED TO BE. I WANT ONE. ” —JOSH JACQUOT, REVIEWS EDITOR

The 2.0-liter diesel and the 3.0-liter supercharged V-6 XEs showed up at 10Best while the turbocharged four-cylinder gas engine did not. We also had the new XF, the middle sedan between the XE and the slinky and sadly too-rare XJ, and were struck by how similar the styling is. Instead of presenting something new in the XE, Jaguar’s designers seem to have just shaved off a few inches from the XF. Jag needs a cymbal crash to announce its rebirth to younger buyers unaccustomed to seeing the leaper offered at affordable lease rates. Yet the XE is two pillows banging together.

We found no real fresh thinking in the XE’s interior, either, about which several voters complained of cramped packaging. The orderly layout of the buttons, gauges, and de rigueur infotainment screen—much improved from previous generations but prone to freezing up in our cars and still lacking a console master-control knob—is convenient enough. But the near universality of black molded plastic and black leather makes for an interior that looks like one big lava flow that froze in 2006.