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:
So what are the i4, Air, Integra Type S, Ioniq 5 N, and Land Cruiser doing there? Fun sure, but important to the average car-buying Canadian? Assuredly not. The Ioniq 5 N carries the strongest case for its innovations in EV driver engagement, but AJAC has its annual Innovation Awards for that. The Acura Integra Type S is a hoot, but more boy-racer than everyday. No value-king Chevy Trax? Fiat 500e over Equinox EV? Why the fewer-seated, same-sized, CX-70s over the less-expensive, same-bodied three-row CX-90? The Lucid Air rides beautifully, but doesn’t necessarily stand out among a field of clever-strutted luxury EVs. As for the Toyota Land Cruiser, the ute is a charming resurrection of a storied name but enters at too high a price and with too niche a purpose for the average crossover-SUV buyer.
Finalists aren’t necessarily winners, of course: that hot-boy Integra was a finalist last year as well, but it was the Toyota Prius that took the top prize. Likewise, the Lucid is an impressive EV that deserves podium recognition, if hopefully not to take the prize from something that means more to Pat the consumer. Still, such fanciful shortlisting can bring fringe vehicles into direct running with more ‘serious’ bread-and-butter offerings — and left to point-based scoring, risk bumping more important vehicles because they offer something better to their four total buyers.
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.
Of course this all depends on what cars are listed, and still more crucially, what cars a juror has actually driven in the past year. Shortlist representation is thus shaped by butts recently in seats, both subconsciously and per voting rules. Toyota’s Canadian press fleet is rounded and easily accessible, meaning plenty of seat time in reviews and easy pickings for comparison tests. BMW runs a thinner get-it-while-it’s-around rotation, while Audi Canada barely maintains a press fleet worth mentioning and Tesla does not offer test units at all. These latter conditions mean that the only serious seat time most journos will get is through Turo rentals, and that as respectable an appliance as the new Model 3 or even Q5 might be, it stands unlikely that either would reach a shortlist, let alone register at all in some jurors’ minds.
This is presumably how the Genesis Electrified G80 beat out the Hyundai Ioniq 6 and Toyota Prius PHEV in last year’s Canadian Electric Car of the Year. Though an impressive integration of full-capability battery technology into what was originally a gasoline platform, the gas G80 is already a low-volume luxury product to begin with; the Electrified only moreso. It is neither an important vehicle to Canadians at large, nor does it necessarily advance motoring in anything more than merely adding to the corpus of handsome sedans. Still, Genesis got people behind the wheel to experience its strong power, agile dynamics, and smooth ride at AJAC’s annual pre-vote Test Fest. Relevant or not, it left an impressive drive fresh in jurors’ minds come time to nominate a shortlist. Scored against the less-luxe Hyundai and Prius, and without a balance calculation for value or market significance by volume, it isn’t much surprise that it took the title from those more pedestrian nominees.
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.
All of this laid, there’s still a good chance that the ultimate awards will find suitable homes. The new Camry’s excellent fuel economy and all-around utility should hopefully place it well to leave the Integra off-stage, and the new Hyundai Santa Fe would absolutely deserve Utility of the Year regardless of its iffy finalist peers. Electric Car is going to be a little unbecoming whichever way it goes between its oddly stratified contenders, but Electric Utility should hopefully make up for it by honouring (albeit late; too few had driven it in time for voting last year) the Kia EV9. And even if the niche Hyundai Ioniq 5 N takes that last award, at least it’ll be going to a genuine innovator.
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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