2025 MotorTrend Best Tech Awards: The Winners
Amid rapid change and rampant hype, these automotive technologies promise a better tomorrow today.
Welcome to the era of downloadable horsepower and steering wheels with no mechanical connection to the front tires. Whether this intrigues you or infuriates you, don’t get hung up on the state of technology today, because one thing’s for sure in the current reality: Tomorrow’s cars will be different.
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Change, of course, is constant in the car business. Humans have dreamed of faster, more capable, more efficient, more comfortable, or more reliable vehicles from the moment Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot hung a boiler on a three-wheel horse cart in 1770. The only difference today is how furiously the pace of progress is accelerating.
Fueled by cheap batteries, powerful software tools, and advanced electronic controls, the car as we know it is experiencing an evolutionary leap. Change on this scale brings hope and hype, and our inaugural MotorTrend Best Tech awards separate the most promising new features from the noise. They’re a celebration of the most innovative software, technologies, and experiences that improve how we move around and within our world.
MotorTrend has covered cars and technology with wide-eyed curiosity and healthy skepticism for 76 years. Understanding what’s new and what’s next is at the core of our daily news coverage, our exhaustive vehicle reviews, and our hallmark Car, Truck, and SUV of the Year programs. Our 2025 Best Tech awards build on that knowledge and the rigorous testing and expert evaluations that underpin everything we do.
To sort the best from all the rest, MotorTrend editors nominated the tech that stood out as we drove more than 400 new cars, trucks, and SUVs in the past year. We homed in on our winners using five criteria: innovation, user experience, usefulness, value, and, where applicable, safety and privacy. These represent our convictions. We believe the best technology simultaneously advances the state of the art and delivers real-world benefits, is easy to use and attainable for the average American, and doesn’t require the user to compromise their privacy or the safety of anyone on the road.
In our inaugural year, we’re handing out awards in 10 categories ranging from powertrains to phone apps. As diverse as the winning technologies are, they are linked by one common theme. They all bridge the physical world and digital realm to make driving, car ownership, or simply getting where we need to go better. Follow the links below to read the full stories of why these technologies rise above the rest.
2025 MotorTrend Best Tech Winners
Infotainment: Lincoln Digital Experience– Our 2025 SUV of the Year pioneers a better way to organize an infotainment system with its 48-inch, 4K screen stretching across the base of the windshield.
Driver Assistance: GM Super Cruise– The hands-free highway assistant available in Chevy, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac vehicles is capable, confident, and responsible, making it the driver assist system we trust to take the wheel.
Chassis: Tesla Cybertruck steer-by-wire– Tesla’s ballistic pickup slides through a Costco parking lot or over the Angeles Crest Highway with grace thanks to an innovative steering setup that replaces the intermediate shaft with a ribbon cable.
Powertrain: Hyundai Ioniq 5 N–Hyundai found the personality missing from so many fast EVs by programming its 641-hp Ioniq 5 N with a barrage of driver-selectable settings, including one that mimics an eight-speed dual-clutch transmission.
Automaker App: Rivian – This phone app is so powerful and so thoughtfully designed that you’ll never miss the conventional key Rivian no longer includes with its trucks and SUVs.
Aftermarket App: PlugShare–We dream of the day when fast, reliable EV charging is as prevalent as gas stations. Until then, PlugShare makes finding the best charging spots easy.
Home EV Charger: Autel MaxiCharger AC Lite Home– Our favorite home charging station combines a slim, flexible cable with a sleek, simple app at a bargain price.
Public Charging Experience: North American Charging System– EV charging is about to get a lot simpler now that automakers and charging companies have united behind the user-friendly Tesla-designed plug that supports home and high-speed public charging.
Robotaxi: Waymo One–Waymo sets the bar for how self-driving car development should be done in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin.
General Excellence: Rivian Gear Guard–The same cameras that power Rivian’s driver assistance systems serve triple duty as a dash cam and security system for keeping an eye on your truck and your stuff. R1T owners can also use an accessory braided steel cable that ties into the central locks to secure objects in the pickup bed.
I fell in love with car magazines during sixth-grade silent reading time and soon realized that the editors were being paid to drive a never-ending parade of new cars and write stories about their experiences. Could any job be better? The answer was obvious to 11-year-old me. By the time I reached high school, becoming an automotive journalist wasn’t just a distant dream, it was a goal. I joined the school newspaper and weaseled my way into media days at the Detroit auto show. With a new driver’s license in my wallet, I cold-called MotorTrend’s Detroit editor, who graciously agreed to an informational interview and then gave me the advice that set me on the path to where I am today. Get an engineering degree and learn to write, he said, and everything else would fall into place. I left nothing to chance and majored in both mechanical engineering and journalism at Michigan State, where a J-school prof warned I’d become a “one-note writer” if I kept turning in stories about cars for every assignment. That sounded just fine by me, so I talked my way into GM’s Lansing Grand River Assembly plant for my next story. My child-like obsession with cars started to pay off soon after. In 2007, I won an essay contest to fly to the Frankfurt auto show and drive the Saturn Astra with some of the same writers I had been reading since sixth grade. Winning that contest launched my career. I wrote for Jalopnik and Edmunds, interned at Automobile, finished school, and turned down an engineering job with Honda for full-time employment with Automobile. In the years since, I’ve written for Car and Driver, The New York Times, and now, coming full circle, MotorTrend. It has been a dream. A big chunk of this job is exactly what it looks like: playing with cars. I’m happiest when the work involves affordable sporty hatchbacks, expensive sports cars, manual transmissions, or any technology that requires I learn something to understand how it works, but I’m not picky. If it moves under its own power, I’ll drive it.
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