Celebrating the best cars of 2020

Monday, 30 November 2020

Welcome to Top Cars 2020.

Who would have thought this time last year when we were revealing our favourite cars of 2019 that the car industry would be so different 12 months later? And not just the car industry, the entire world has changed.

Let’s be honest; 2020 has been bewildering and exhausting.

Covid-19 laid waste to the car industry globally and has drastically changed the way we as motoring journalists do our jobs – quite aside from the fact that there was that entire month we couldn’t even drive, global supply of cars was constrained, launches delayed or cancelled entirely and even collecting a car to test was a fraught, socially-distanced and hand sanitiser-drenched thing.

**READ MORE:

* Celebrating the best cars of 2019

* Five reigning Cars of the Year for 2018

* What will the Top Cars of 2018 be?

* What will the Stuff Motoring Top Car of 2017 be?

**

And let’s not even talk about the dreaded rise of the 3am online “virtual” car launch, beamed from Europe at a civilised hour (for them) to bleary-eyed, half asleep journos at the bottom of the world.

But through it all, we still managed to do what we love best – drive some excellent cars. And that is what we are celebrating here.

Top Cars 2020 has a very different look this year – we have had to slim it down and take a far lower-key approach for various Covid-affected reasons, but our basic ideals remain the same: it's as much about identifying the cars that have engaged us and excited as it is about the ones that do the most things for the most people in the broadest way.

As always, we've awarded winners in a variety of categories and from the list of individual winners comes our Top Car overall winner.

Here’s how it works: we keep a master list of cars reviewed by the Stuff Motoring team between the end of September last year – when we signed off that year's winners - and the beginning of October this year and any new car we drive in that time is eligible for consideration.

This year we drove fewer cars (thanks Covid…) but were also a bit more elastic on our cut-off dates for eligibility, due to the fact that so many launches had been delayed and disrupted, which is why this is all happening a bit later than usual.

We don't get too wound up about how new a model is, because the way we see it, if you can buy it and we've reviewed it in the right timeframe, it should count.

From that overall list the judges rank their favourites, resulting in actual points. But the cold, hard numbers don't necessarily determine the winner, because we like to get face-to-face and argue it out as well. Except this year that was done virtually too – thanks Zoom!

This year we decided to get our friends at CarNut involved in the judging, so the ultimate decision was made by a team consisting of myself, Damien O’Carroll, and Stuff Motoring reporter Nile Bijoux, as well as the CarNut line up of Blu Steven, Cameron Officer and Steve Vermeulen.

This year more than any other previously there have been cars that not all of us have reviewed, so if an individual judge reckons they've driven a winner that the others haven't, it's up to them to argue the case. And because we trust and respect each other's experience and judgement, we listen. Sometimes.

Once we have slimmed down the list to just our category winners, then we start again to find our overall champ – the judges rank them again, and then we have another civilised discussion where no voices are raised or chairs thrown in any way at all.

Not that there was much disagreement this year, because the winning car being easily decided on this year, with only a single dissenter among the five judges (it was Nile).

The overall winner always stirs up controversy and arouses passionate opinion no matter what is it and our previous Top Cars have included the Holden Spark (2016), Skoda Kodiaq (2017), Volkswagen Polo (2018) and the Toyota RAV4 last year.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s get into the winners of Top Cars 2020!