Last month I undertook one of my most important tasks in role as a motoring journalist, by casting my votes in the Autobest 2016 awards. This organisation is made up of one motoring journalist from each country, and now stretches across 26 markets from Ireland to Russia. Its role as an organisation is to determine the best car for consumers to buy, with that caveat that it must cost no more than €20,000 excluding all local taxes in each country. The car buyer is at the very centre of this so it's a task that I take pretty serious.
Whilst it's still too soon for me to say which car won the 2016 award, the five finalists are the Fiat Tipo, Honda HR-V, Hyundai Tucson, Mazda CX-3 and the Opel Astra. Our votes are all cast secretly, but I can tell you about the judging and how we went about it. The voting is divided into 13 sections with a total of 240 points being awarded overall. These range from the expected areas such as design, engineering and safety to aspects such as cost of ownership, access to dealer networks in our respective countries and of course the car's environmental credentials. As you can imagine it wasn't something we banged out in between mealtimes.
For fairness in comparison, all five finalists were tested in Belgrade at the Navak Test Centre. Here we were able to drive all of the cars back-to-back both on the road and at higher speeds on the test track. The facility also enabled us to conduct a number of experiments such as high-speed direction changes and emergency braking manoeuvres. We really put every car through the ringer in a bid to find any chink in their armour from a driving perspective.
In addition to all of these different criteria we must also keep the consumer in mind. Ultimately the winner is the car that 25 journalists (and me) are saying is the best value car to buy in Europe at this time. No pressure then.
Between drives it was really interesting to talk to the other jury members to hear the different opinions. We each have our own ways of assessing a car and it was enlightening to see which aspects we agreed on and also the ones that we didn't. Being able to go straight from one car to another also plays an important part, and often it was the second or third time driving a car that you became aware of something.
For me it came down to two cars by the end of the event and even at that it was a close run to the finish when my voting was submitted. Incidentally, all of our votes will be made public on the Autobest website after the winner has been announced. In truth, all of the finalists are very good cars and I don't think anyone who has bought or plans to buy one of them will be disappointed by their purchase. But dissecting each of these cars and examining every aspect in fine detail was about establishing the best of the best. Now that I've recovered from the data overload, I can say it was one of the more interesting things I have done as a motoring journalist and I'm very glad to have been able to play a part in it.