This year's Carsguide Car of the Year to be revealed soon.
Carsguide's prestigious Car of the Year awards, covering the length and breadth of the country, is bigger and better than ever.
The award categories this year are:
* 2011 Carsguide Car of the Year
* 2011 Carsguide People's Choice
Motoring editors and senior writers from Sydney's The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, Melbourne's Herald Sun, Brisbane's The Courier-Mail, Adelaide's The Advertiser, Perth's Sunday Times and carsguide.com.au website have rolled up their sleeves and dug into the year's new car releases to find Australia's best new car overall.
Carsguide Car of the Year award
Throughout the year an exhaustive search and culling process of every car launched in Australia was conducted to find our ten Car of the Year finalists.
Judged on criteria ranging across styling, safety, innovation, value, functionality, build quality and performance, the finalists are scored in a variety of situations including two days of road driving and a full day's examination over proving ground test roads in Victoria.
The process starts with each judge selecting their top ten cars of the year. Those choices are based on years of experience, and in the case of our ten experts that is well in excess of a century of accumulated knowledge, applied to driving as many as 100 models in the past year. The first round of selections are scored and the top ten become the finalists.
With the finalists brought together for three days of extensive back-to-back comparisons, the judges have the opportunity to revisit each of the cars on the same surfaces and conditions before ranking the final ten from best to not-so-best. The top five of these are then re-tested, re-discussed -- often re-argued -- and re-scored. A final discussion leads to the judges each considereding and tallying their final scores for each car, and ranking them in order. These results are collated and tallied to reveal the the Carsguide Car of the Year and runners up.
Carsguide People's Choice award
The Carsguide People's Choice Award lets the public, the Australian people and beyond, choose who they think is the best car from the field of Carsguide Car of the Year finalists. By voting for your favourite car you could win an iPad or shopping vouchers.
