Ah, car of the year (COTY) awards. The magical time of year when every magazine, website, and national auto journalist association decides that it has to make a definitive call on the best automobile that money can buy. And though nobody on the consumer end really takes these things seriously (when have you ever heard someone say they bought a car because it was (institution name here’s) COTY?), the folks in charge of these awards get incredibly intense about their mission. Take the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC) and its self-righteous rage at a Canadian journalist, Michael Banovsky, who had the gall to report that the Canadian COTY competition removes perfect scores (as revealed in the judge training webinar video above). The AJAC immediately demanded a retraction, clarifying what their video didn’t:
No votes were thrown out, but rather if any appear as a 10, they are “discounted” to 9.9 during tabulation by the international accounting firm of KPMG. This has been the practice for many years because, as any experienced automotive journalist knows, nothing is perfect, especially something as complex as a motor vehicle.
Recent Comments
DrivenToMadness - This is a serious question. I know this car doesn’t photo very well, but for all the haters, have you really looked at one in the flesh? To me, it...
dantes_inferno - Hmm, so that’s where those darned Pinto design blueprints went to…
jimbob457 - God bless you. In the words of our great President William Jefferson Clinton: “I feel your pain”. So, why are you still, after all this...
Beerboy12 - The gas tank probably had nothing to do with the fire. There are so many things in an engine bay and in...
Flybrian - Let’s fill ‘Studios’ with multiple 500 iterations nobody wants and dump a well-known volume seller....
Mark Morrison - Looks like the Merc was in Fisker trim
Kookie2 - Can’t do it. Need a hand to hold over one eye.
Mark Morrison - No but he was Triple F (Fair F***kn Flying) when he hit that tree by the look of it
geozinger - If the 500L is a bigger 500, that would put it roughly in the same size category as the original Chrysler minivans. As I loved those vans for their size and...
Hummer - Actually tonycd H2s were made by AM General, and that facility was reutilized almost instantly. Not all