The 2020 World Car of the Year awards are out, and the winner is…

Enlarge / The 2020 Kia Telluride, 2020 World Car of the Year winner. (credit: BradleyWarren Photography)

If 2020 had been a normal year, this week would have been packed with news from the New York International Auto Show. Instead, the Javits Center in Manhattan is being converted into a mass intensive care unit to handle up to 3,000 COVID-19 patients. That has crimped the plans of every OEM hoping to make a splash with a new reveal at NYIAS this year, but one small slice of normality remains-the World Car Awards. Instead of holding a press conference in New York, the steering committee decided to use the power of YouTube to make the announcements from the safety of their homes. And as yours truly is one of the jurors, I figured it was worth climbing my way out of a pit of existential despair to bring you the winners.

Each juror is only allowed to vote for a car they've actually driven. For the first round of voting, we are asked to rank the cars in each category. Once that's done, the second round asks jurors to rank the finalists from 1 to 10 in a range of attributes, including design, safety, performance, technology, the environment, value for money, and so on, with the final three being announced a few weeks ahead of time.

World Urban Car

Of the top three finalists, I've driven two of them-the Kia Soul EV, which made my top 10 cars of 2019, and the Volkswagen T-Cross, which decidedly didn't. The third contender is the Mini Electric-my press loan is not scheduled until mid-May, so in the meantime you could always check out Jonny Smith's recent video review. The other cars that didn't make it were the Peugeot 208, Renault Clio, Hyundai Venue (which I thought was rather good), Opel/Vauxhall Corsa, and the Renault Zoe R135.

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