Welcome to the Auto Express New Car Awards, the definitive verdicts on the best new cars of every type on sale today. 12 months of extensive testing by our expert road testers over thousands of miles went into choosing the winners in 26 separate categories. If you’re buying a new car in the UK today, these are the models we recommend, the ones you should not ignore.
Auto Express’s New Car Awards are a very big deal. I’m one of British motoring journalism’s older guard, and the NCAs (as we call them) started in 1993, five years before I got into this game.
Despite my venerable years, I’m the Auto Express new boy, having joined last year. That enables me to have a fairly objective, semi-outsider status on the NCAs, having enviously monitored them from my old title. There we had a very inconsistent attitude towards awards and eventually gave up on them.
Not Auto Express. It’s made some absolutely brilliant calls for its Car of the Year, such as the ground-breaking 2001 MINI – amusingly overlooked by Europe’s Car of the Year jury in favour of Peugeot’s 307. Insert rolling-on-the-floor-laughing emoji here.
Or how about this for a purple patch? 2010 Skoda Yeti – a brilliant compact SUV that was way ahead of its time; 2011 Range Rover Evoque – the style icon went up like a firework and ‘inspired’ (ahem) the Jaecoo 7. And crowning Tesla’s Model 3 in 2019 – when Elon Musk was palatable – captured the significance of that electric vehicle.
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