Passive RadiatorThat leaves passive radiators and bandpass boxes. Passive radiators are very similar to a vented box, but in order to not suffer from the same non-linearity problem you find in typical vented boxes, you need the radiator to be larger than the woofer. A 12" woofer needs at least a 15" radiator and that means a lot of baffle real estate to work properly. They can sound good but have a sound quality that's somewhat different than vented boxes. Group delay for a passive radiator box is greater than vented boxes or sealed boxes.
BandpassThis brings us to bandpass enclosures. These are larger than typical sealed or vented boxes because they require two box volumes in one enclosure, but have a really cool efficiency bandwidth tradeoff thing going for them. You can make them a little less efficient and go very low. If you make them with ports, you still have the same port tube linearity problem, and group delay is far worse than the any other type of enclosure.
So what's the bottom line here? I think that for car audio, if you know what you're doing, you can make any of these types of enclosures work well and sound more than acceptable. Sealed boxes are still the most popular box in car audio. You can get a large (12" to 15") high-excursion woofer work into a small box (1ft3 to 2ft3) and produce and low-frequency roll-off of 40Hz to 50Hz, perfect considering the acoustic lift in the average car, truck, RV or van, and with good transient performance. Likewise, a well-damped Qb3 vented box can also be made compact and roll-off in the 40Hz range with a transient performance almost as good as a sealed box, although you still have the port nonlinearity issue.
So which woofer is best for which type of box? A good criterion is called EBP or Efficiency Bandwidth Product and was first suggested by well-known audio engineer Richard Small (yeah, the Small in Thiele/Small parameters). You can calculate any woofer's EBP by dividing the resonance frequency by the driver electrical Q (Qes). If your woofer has an Fs of 20Hz and a Qes of 0.50, EBP is 40. EBP numbers in the vicinity of 50 or lower generally are best suited in sealed boxes. Numbers 100 and higher are best suited to vented boxes. Numbers between 50 and 100 are often able to offer good performance in both sealed and vented boxes. Like all rules, this one can be broken. Any EBP 50 and lower woofer can be put in a vented box, although it's typically a vented box with seriously high group delay. Likewise, any EBP 100 or higher woofer can be put in a sealed box, but will usually have a rather high f3 roll-off frequency. It's less about finding the perfect box, than knowing how make any given woofer do its best.