Despite much rose-tinted crowing from people who spend way too much time on the internet romanticizing the past, cars are objectively better than they’ve ever been. They’re safer, faster, quieter, more efficient, and more luxurious than ever before, and the common car journo refrain that there aren’t really many truly bad cars being made anymore is indeed true. Even so, there are levels to this stuff, and now’s the time of year when we separate the good from the truly great: It’s time for The Drive Awards.
Over the next week, we’ll be handing out trophies across six main categories. Best Truck is being announced in a couple of hours, Best Car Under $40K and Best Performance Car will be revealed tomorrow, Best SUV is dropping Wednesday, Best EV will be crowned on Thursday, and the overall Best Car—whose finalists will consist of the winners of the previous five categories—will be named on Friday.
Finalists were picked based on review scores and winners were determined via team vote. To be eligible, vehicles had to be new or at the very least meaningfully updated for this year and driven by somebody on The Drive‘s staff or roster of contributors sometime in 2024.
Just like last year, we also have two special categories: Top Dog Car and Drive of the Year. TDC will go to the vehicle that accommodated canines best in our “Will It Dog?” series this year while DOY is reserved for that one special drive that happened to be something other than a new, production road car—retro cars, prototypes, racing cars, wacky concepts, motorcycles, unicycles, jet skis, flying broomsticks, hydrogen-powered tricycles, all that is fair game here.
Making a return from last year are audience votes on Instagram. Throughout the week, we’ll be running polls via IG Stories—you’re following us already, right?—to see which car you all think should win each regular category, and the car with the most votes will get a little extra honor as the People’s Choice. Polls go live a day before each Award is announced.
And if you don’t have Instagram… tough luck, I guess you’ll just have to go with whatever we picked to win, sorry.
Got a tip or question for the author? You can reach him here: chris.tsui@thedrive.com