Some sensible, some irrelevant; the shortlist is in
The Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC) announced its finalists for 2025 Canadian Car of the Year (CCOTY) at yesterday’s opening of the Montreal International Auto Show. Now condensed into four simplified categories, the twelve contenders follow an initial unscored shortlist of vehicles nominated by jurors, who could name up to five vehicles per category.
The finalists represent the tally of some 600 ballots more precisely judging those 20 original nominees, along with their three additional fifth-place ties. Of these 12, the highest-scoring in each category will be revealed and awarded at February’s Canadian International Auto Show in Toronto.
There’s some great metal among this year’s finalists — and some that we may love, but that may not be so important. We’ll get to that though.
2025 Canadian Car of the Year finalists:
2025 Canadian Utility Vehicle of the Year finalists:
2025 Canadian Electric Car of the Year finalists:
2025 Canadian Electric Utility Vehicle of the Year finalists:
CCOTY scoring categories are equally weighted and include engine, transmission, brakes, suspension, handling, exterior design, interior design, interior ergonomics, NVH (noise, vibration, harshness), infotainment, safety features, value, and consumer appeal; engine and transmission are replaced by a single ‘powertrain’ line in EV categories.
Scoring is scaled from 1-10, with a detailed voting guide to help jurors find a bearing. Whether a juror’s scores lean high or low is hypothetically immaterial in the narrowing of an ultimate winner, given that most will presumably vote on all cars from a consistent personal baseline, and with consistent tone across all vehicles. Even a low-pointing juror’s highest scorer will thus contribute to that vehicle’s ranking, relative to the impact their votes will have on the other vehicles’ averages.
Part of this, in fairness, is a matter of category weighting. CCOTY score categories are all equally weighted, with each score figuring into an overall average regardless of assignment. The challenge in this is that introduction of additional parameters progressively dilutes others’ weighting: by separating and equally weighting steering, braking, and suspension, for instance, this breakup indirectly assigns the broad category of ‘handling’ three times the point weight of cost/value. In the case of Integra, seven doubtless high handling, style, and powertrain scores would have easily buried the Prius’ two points on value and consumer appeal.
Unfortunately the ideal solution is costly. Auto manufacturers pay tens of thousands in licencing fees to data vendors such as Ipsos and J.D. Power, which provide their product planners with comprehensive insight into consumer priorities and survey feedback. A nonprofit like AJAC, of course, hasn’t budget for anything of the sort, at least at standard industry rates. A fallback could be to reassign point weights, though such distribution would be difficult to truly, representatively calculate.
Ultimately too, democratically reconciling such a diverse breadth of perspectives and expertise into a single award program is no easy or enviable undertaking. Colleagues around the world share frustrations with the minutiae of their own local programs, be they North American Car of the Year, World Car Awards, Women’s Worldwide Car of the Year, what have you. And while some publications have taken to assigning their own awards from in-house, their limited scope and relative opacity simply can’t match quite the gravity of these national and international juries of automotive experts.
As is so often the case, what we’ve got isn’t perfect, but it’s still something worthwhile. Award season has its place as a high-level consumer barometer, as a back-and-forth exercise for manufacturers and the journalists critiquing them, and as an annual reckoning that drives reviewers to critically reassess their experiences from the past year.
Ultimately though, a Car of the Year award was never a consumer commandment. Measure your (real) needs, work out your budget (and not just on nine years of small, interest-laden weekly payments), and dig into the research. Remember that we jurors across Canada originally drove each of these vehicles to file a review, and you can find our reports on these tests as well as all manner of head-to-head comparisons with segment competitors here on Driving.ca and in our peers’ distribution as well. Canada is a small market, and we’re fortunate to have such a strong roster of automotive journalists with such access to press units to test before you sign the dotted line.
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