THE 2024 SA CAR OF THE YEAR COMPETITION IS ALMOST UPON US - HERE ARE YOUR FINALISTS.

It’s almost time for the annual Car of the Year competition here in SA, it will run under the name of the Old Mutual Insure 2024 Car of the Year and after a lot of behind-the-scenes things, the top 18 finalists have been announced. The South African Guild of Mobility Journalists (SAGMJ) assembled a team of jurors made up of a bunch of SA’s top motoring journalists and industry folk who have been hard at work to whittle down a pretty long list of new cars into a more manageable amount, divided across eight categories. To find these category winners, the jurors will be putting all the cars through their paces over a couple of days of physical testing and scoring at Zwartkops Raceway in Pretoria. While all the categories have interesting cars and criteria, we’re obviously most interested in the Performance stuff, because duh. We don’t think there’s anything in the lineup that will end up with a controversial-like win like that time a Porsche took the title or last year’s win by a bakkie, but you never can tell. An EV win would upset some people, but that’s because most locals can’t fathom owning an EV while we have Eskom issues. Some also get upset when a premium car wins, the perception is that a car of the year should be something affordable that everyone has access to, but price really isn't a factor, it has more to do with how well the car does the various things that are tested, which puts the budget cars on a level playing field with the expensive stuff. I still can’t wrap my head around how it all works, but I do know that I’ve driven cars that I could afford and cars that I could never afford and sometimes the ones in my budget just do everything better. This is why I prefer to take pics of these things, the camera doesn’t care about cost or performance stats, only looks. Which are also subjective, of course. Enough rambling, here are the categories and the finalists:

Take a look at the YouTube video that shows off the testing that took place at the 2023 instalment of other SA Car of the Year so that you can get a good idea of what will soon be happening to get that 18-car finalist list down to a single winner in each category: Car Of The Year 2023 | IGNITION

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