Wheels Car of the Year since 1963

WELCOME to the world’s longest running continuous car of the year award.

Inaugurated in 1963, and the brainchild of then-editor Bill Tuckey, the Wheels’ Car Of The Year award came about in an era of complacency in the Australian motor industry.

General Motors’ Holden (that also included Chevrolet, Vauxhall, and Pontiac cars) held sway with almost 50 per cent of the market, with a big chunk of the rest carved up between eight other local manufacturers and assemblers – Ford, BMC (Austin, Morris, MG), Chrysler (including Dodge and Simca), Volkswagen, Rootes Group (Hillman, Humber, Singer), Australian Motor Industries (Toyota, Rambler and Triumph), Continental and General (Peugeot, Renault, Studebaker, Citroen, NSU), and Lightburn.

Most marques are now long-gone and forgotten, but it’s worth noting that only one of the fledgling Japanese carmakers is represented, Toyota. Japan was just amassing her armada of superbly built and utterly reliable vehicles, so many buyers just blindly accepted that Australian-built vehicles came standard with sub-standard performance, shoddy quality, and suspect dependability.

Consequently, Tuckey spent almost a year perfecting what a ‘car of the year’ should be, “having spent the other 11 months belabouring the manufacturers with the deficiencies of their products”, as he later wrote, so created the COTY award to encourage a better-built Australian vehicle.

The original key criteria of engineering excellence, advanced design, and value for money have remained over the decades, but the field was opened up in the mid-1970s to include the whole market of new vehicle releases, including imports.

Nowadays, COTY also assesses function (how well the vehicle works), efficiency (how effectively does it utilise material resources), and safety, to create an unrivalled backbone of benchmarks that each and every one of the contenders on question must meet in order to take out the coveted award.

There have been controversies galore in the 48 years since Wheels first presented the COTY trophy – including three occasions when no vehicle has been deemed good enough to win (1972, 1979 and 1986 – and all under the stewardship of then-editor and current judge Peter Robinson), while some models – most famously the 1973 Leyland P76 V8 and 1982 Holden JB Camira) won even though there were sub-standard models in the range.

These issues, along with others like three dead-heats (1983 Mazda 626/Ford Telstar, 1991 Nissan Pulsar/Honda NSX, and 1992 Mazda 626/Ford Telstar), have now been dealt with, so the Wheels COTY process and award can continue to be presented as the most thoughtfully conceived and thoroughly conducted process of its type in the world today.

That’s why it was so important back in 1963, and why COTY is more essential than ever in 2011…

Related video: Watch the video below to see who won the WHEELS Car of the Year in 2010:

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