The Drive Awards 2023: The Best Cars We Drove This Year
This time around, you get a say.
We probably couldn't call ourselves The Drive if we didn't drive a lot of cars. Well, in 2023 we drove a lot of cars. Fast cars, slow cars, big cars, small cars, good cars, bad cars—we drove them all and to take stock and honor the best stuff from the last 12 months, it's time to kick off The Drive's second annual end-of-year Awards.
Yes, ladies and gents, the Golden Slash is back.
Just like last year, trophies will be handed out across six main categories. Best Truck will be announced later today, Best EV and Best SUV will drop tomorrow, Best Car Under $40,000 will be published Wednesday, Best Performance Car will be revealed Thursday, and the overall Best Car will bow on Friday. We'll also be sprinkling in a couple of new, special categories throughout the week which we're keeping as surprises for now.
Finalists were picked based on review scores, which were then put to a team-wide vote to determine the winner. The finalists for the overall Best Car consisted of the winners of the other five main categories: Best Truck, EV, SUV, Car Under $40K, and Performance Car. To be eligible, the contenders had to be new or at least heavily updated, purchasable-by-the-public production cars a member of The Drive team drove in 2023.
One thing we're introducing this year is an audience-determined People's Choice for those five categories. Throughout the week, we'll be running polls via our Instagram Stories to see which car you all think should win, and the car with the most reader votes will be honored with a little "People's Choice" tag. The polls will be up for a day before each Award is officially handed out, so as of this writing, you should still be able to vote for Best Truck while audience surveys for Best EV and Best SUV will be up very soon if they aren't live already. The link to our 'gram page is below if you'd like to participate and consider giving us a follow if you haven't already. We do pretty cool stuff on there from time to time, or so I've heard.
Got a tip or question for the author? You can reach him here: chris.tsui@thedrive.com
