Introducing MotorTrend's 2022 Performance Vehicle of the Year: A New Era
We've replaced our Best Driver's Car shootout with PVOTY. Here's why, and more details.
Welcome toMotorTrend's inaugural Performance Vehicle of the Year (PVOTY) competition. A quick history: We've awarded our Car of the Year title since 1949. In 1978, we added Truck of the Year and then SUV of the Year in 1999. Alongside Person of the Year, these have been our automotive Of The Year awards for decades.
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Until now.
Why, and why now? It's instructive to look back atMotorTrend's old Import Car of the Year. First awarded in 1970, the idea of ICOTY was to finally acknowledge an indisputable truth: Cars from auto manufacturers outside of America were here to stay and should be celebrated, at least for a while.
We awarded ICOTY alongside COTY until 1999, when my predecessors decided to fold the former back into the latter because shifts in automotive manufacturing and global economics challenged the notion of what constitutes foreign and domestic vehicle production. What is a car's country of origin if the engine is made in Brazil, the body panels are stamped in Canada, the transmission and wiring harness are produced in Mexico, and final assembly occurs in Michigan? Or if multiple factories around the world assemble the same vehicle? Our editorial forebears ultimately decided none of this matters and that the inherent goodness of the car, the breakthrough experience it delivers, and how history would view it were much more important.
They read the room and made the right call, which is what we are doing here with our focus on performance. I submit to you the following:
We live in a golden automotive age. Thirteen years ago, we reported the horsepower wars were over. We were wrong. To twitch an eyebrow these days, you need at least 500 hp, if not four figures for tongues to really start wagging. This inflation is not just limited to hyper-expensive exotic cars. For $37,000, you can buy a Ford Mustang GT with 460 ponies. Need more vroom? Try the 505-hp Alfa Romeo Stelvio. Or if you need to move a couch, in a hurry, up a sand dune? The 702-hp Ram 1500 TRX has you covered.
These power and torque increases, along with all the fancy systems that allow their delivery, have resulted in a golden age of performance, as well. Those who monitor lap records at the vaunted Nürburgring Nordschleife know what I'm talking about. It used to be that a stock production car lapping the iconic German test track in less than 8 minutes joined an exclusive club. Now, a hot hatch like the Honda Civic Type R is quicker than that, and we see Porsches, Mercedes-AMGs, and Lamborghinis running in the 6:40 (or quicker) bracket. Our own testing bears this out; in the past two years, we've seen our 0-60 record fall twice—first to less than 3.0 seconds and then to almost less than 2.0. This is bonkers.
Megawatt advances in automotive tech are responsible for a lot of this golden-era shine. While one of the highest-horsepower production cars is still a 16-cylinder, quad-turbo, gas-burning Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, you can order our electrifying 2022 Car of the Year Lucid Air with up to 1,111 hp, or a Tesla Model S with 1,020 hp. On the truck side, the Hummer EV pickup is also available with 1,000 hp, and our 2022 Truck of the Year, the Rivian R1T, comes standard with 835 hp. Oh, and the two vehicles that broke our 0-60 record? Electric all-stars from Porsche and Tesla.
As we continue to cover the evolution of the automobile and the automotive industry, we believe our electrified future is inevitable, so we're going to walk a second, parallel path with all the existing, mostly gas-burning vehicles we know and love.
Internal combustion technology has never seen higher outputs, greater efficiency, or more thrills per cubic inch than right now. But as more carmakers trumpet about going all in on EVs, we receive quietly distributed notices about their final run of internal combustion engines, starting with the burliest V-10s and V-8s. Exiting right alongside: manual transmissions.
We know some of you mourn the coming loss of dropping the clutch, mashing the gas, and ripping your right hand through six or seven gears. You loudly curse this transition; we hear you and understand. Every year, for more than a decade, we sent dozens of staffers on the road for two weeks, testing and driving the world's top sports cars in search of the Best Driver's Car. But that BDC program has run its course; PVOTY is Version 2.0, built upon the belief it's possible to be excited for the future, embracing all the broken barriers to come, while celebrating the end of an era. That is what we set out to do with our Performance Vehicle of the Year. We're applying our decades of experience and rigorous, industry-leading Of The Year framework to the realm of performance machines, whatever body style they happen to come in.
Time is short. The world is changing. So let's round up the stickiest-tired whoop machines—whether gas- or electron-powered—and smoke 'em while we got 'em (and can still drive 'em). Please enjoy our firstMotorTrendPerformance Vehicle of Year competition.
I used to go kick tires with my dad at local car dealerships. I was the kid quizzing the sales guys on horsepower and 0-60 times, while Dad wandered around undisturbed. When the salesmen finally cornered him, I'd grab as much of the glossy product literature as I could carry. One that still stands out to this day: the beautiful booklet on the Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX that favorably compared it to the Porsches of the era. I would pore over the prose, pictures, specs, trim levels, even the fine print, never once thinking that I might someday be responsible for the asterisked figures "*as tested by Motor Trend magazine." My parents, immigrants from Hong Kong, worked their way from St. Louis, Missouri (where I was born) to sunny Camarillo, California, in the early 1970s. Along the way, Dad managed to get us into some interesting, iconic family vehicles, including a 1973 Super Beetle (first year of the curved windshield!), 1976 Volvo 240, the 1977 Chevrolet Caprice Classic station wagon, and 1984 VW Vanagon. Dad imbued a love of sports cars and fast sedans as well. I remember sitting on the package shelf of his 1981 Mazda RX-7, listening to him explain to my Mom - for Nth time - what made the rotary engine so special. I remember bracing myself for the laggy whoosh of his turbo diesel Mercedes-Benz 300D, and later, his '87 Porsche Turbo. We were a Toyota family in my coming-of-age years. At 15 years and 6 months, I scored 100 percent on my driving license test, behind the wheel of Mom's 1991 Toyota Previa. As a reward, I was handed the keys to my brother's 1986 Celica GT-S. Six months and three speeding tickets later, I was booted off the family insurance policy and into a 1983 Toyota 4x4 (Hilux, baby). It took me through the rest of college and most of my time at USC, where I worked for the Daily Trojan newspaper and graduated with a biology degree and business minor. Cars took a back seat during my stint as a science teacher for Teach for America. I considered a third year of teaching high school science, coaching volleyball, and helping out with the newspaper and yearbook, but after two years of telling teenagers to follow their dreams, when I wasn't following mine, I decided to pursue a career in freelance photography. After starving for 6 months, I was picked up by a tiny tuning magazine in Orange County that was covering "The Fast and the Furious" subculture years before it went mainstream. I went from photographer-for-hire to editor-in-chief in three years, and rewarded myself with a clapped-out 1989 Nissan 240SX. I subsequently picked up a 1985 Toyota Land Cruiser (FJ60) to haul parts and camera gear. Both vehicles took me to a more mainstream car magazine, where I first sipped from the firehose of press cars. Soon after, the Land Cruiser was abandoned. After a short stint there, I became editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Sport Compact Car just after turning 30. My editorial director at the time was some long-haired dude with a funny accent named Angus MacKenzie. After 18 months learning from the best, Angus asked me to join Motor Trend as senior editor. That was in 2007, and I've loved every second ever since.
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