Autumn is always a crazy time of the year, especially if you’re north of the border. From Canadian Thanksgiving to the winterization of fun cars to trying to work off Thanksgiving dinner, things get a little bit busy. For me, they’re only getting busier. This week, I’ve had exactly one normal behind-the-laptop day before jumping into one of my favourite yearly extracurriculars, the Automobile Journalist Association of Canada’s TestFest for Canadian Car of the Year.
Every autumn, carriers of vehicles and cars full of journalists descend on a rural location as part of the pursuit of crowning the best car, utility vehicle, electric car, and electric utility vehicle in the land. While all new cars are eligible for the awards, TestFest is a great way to get a whole bunch of seat time in one go, and automakers are known to bring out a surprise or two every so often.
This year’s crop of vehicles looks fantastic, with everything from the affordable Hyundai Elantra Hybrid on the way up to stuff like the Porsche Taycan Sport Turismo GTS, the Hyundai Ioniq 9, and—hopefully—the Lucid Gravity. Oh, and several other cars I may or may not be allowed to talk about yet. As you’d probably expect, the field skews crossover-heavy as that’s the way the market’s going, but it’s a fun way to back-to-back some of the most desirable new cars at all sorts of price brackets.
It goes without saying that most Car of the Year awards are somewhat opaque, and you can’t weight them all equally given how criteria varies so wildly from judging body to judging body. However, I want to take the time to demystify Canadian Car of the Year for everyone, give you a little peek behind the curtain as to how the sausage is made, from judging to the rollout of finalists and winners.
So, without further ado, I open the floor to you. Ask me literally anything about any of the vehicles I’m about to drive, about the judging criteria, about all of it, and I’ll try to answer to the best of my abilities.
Top graphic image: Thomas Hundal
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Why are you and every other automotive journalist going to give German cars a press pass when it comes to their terrible build quality and especially their god awful reliability?
Which one holds the greatest number of extra-large double-doubles?
It looks like you are testing now. Being a Canadian car of the year, how can you rank it’s most important skills like winter handling and thermal management? Some vehicles these days have pretty wimpy heaters, and some get heat flowing far sooner than others. I need to know if this is gonna leave me a popsicle on a 15 minute drive in -30(real thermal units, Yankees), without needing to do the Alberta idle, or worse, resort to a Saskatchewan thermostat.
Will the ADAS allow me to eat poutine on the 407?
does Canada do it’s own crash testing? does it involve crashing into a moose?
Funnily enough the Swedes do have a crash test (or really crash avoidance test) called the “Moose Test” where they swerve sharply at high speeds – as if one were avoiding a moose – to see if the car topples.
So unless I read this totally wrong, there’s no one company that puts this on, it’s more of a united front of journalists from all over? I’d really like to know how the deliberation works!
Like I cant see guys from fun-centered rags like Autopian and R&T coming to a close consensus with teams from places like Consumer Reports or Pop Mechanics.
Is there winter testing involved?
Are there regional tests? (testing bumpers a la Montreal street parking, how well the vehicle tracks on 800km of long flat Saskachwan roads with significant sidewinds)
And is there a regional-pick, or is all the testing done out of a Toronto suburb, and assumed the rest of the country is all the same?
Yeah, eh?
Serious question: assuming there’s some route you’ll be driving these cars through, how much does more spirited driving come into consideration with judgment?
Silly question: which car is the best for eating a plate of road trip poutine? 😛
What’s the rules for eligibility?
Well every car mentioned is a car company from another country. Is there a Canadian Car Manufacturer, and what qualifies as a Canadian Car of the year?
Are there any Canada-only cars this year? Cars you get but we don’t