Where’s the best place to meet Jamie Lee Curtis? Why, at the bustling corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Federal Avenue near hippy-dippy Santa Monica, California, where you can’t toss a watermelon without hitting a Toyota Prius.

Jamie Lee will be the one in the merlot-colored Honda, gliding up to one of those rarest of things, a commercial hydrogen fuel pump. Stand there, enjoying the company of the loitering beach bums for a day or three, and you’re all but guaranteed to see her roll in, low on juice, her FCX Clarity shaped like an Australian lungfish and whining like a tomcat being scalped.

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Forget everything you knew about the Kia Sorento—if you knew anything at all. The former body-on-frame SUV has been reinvented in its second generation as a far more relevant, if slightly less macho, crossover. And not a moment too soon.

“Everything is new except for the Sorento name,” says Sorento product strategy manager Steve Hirashiki. He’s right. Even its birthplace is new. Built at Kia’s brand-spankin’-fresh factory in West Point, Georgia, about 85 miles southwest of Atlanta, the Sorento is the American car industry’s newest naturalized citizen.

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With its Pep Boys-inspired rear wing, fancy stick-on graphics, and a growlingly means-business exhaust note, the King of All Mustangs does not just show up — it sort of presents itself. Its appearance should be accompanied by a "ta-da!"

Such as, "Ta-da! There it is rounding Turn Three!" And "Ta-da! Now it’s coming into the pits!"

Ford would like to sell you one. "Ta-da! Thanks for your $225,000! Please enjoy your new full-race, 550-hp Mustang."

Your first question is, of course, "Can I drive it on the street?" The answer: If you live in Hazzard County, maybe.

The list of available-to-the-public hot Mustangs, already lengthy with efforts by Ford’s own SVT and tuners such as Shelby, Roush, Steeda, and Saleen, grows by one with the pending addition of the King of All Mustangs, which comes from an unlikely source: Ford’s own racing division, which turned to Multimatic Motorsports, a Canadian performance company, to complete the project. The naturally aspirated engine comes from Roush-Yates, the NASCAR boys. The inspiration and the initial investment come from Dan Davis, director of Ford Racing Technology.

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