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CAR OF THE YEAR 2020

What will be the Car of the Year?

Cars
| 22-02-2020
On March 2nd will be announced which car may call itself the Car of the Year 2020. In this mini series I count down to that moment, by discussing one of the seven nominees every day. I try to estimate the odds of every contender and put the model and brand in a historical perspective. That lot from the day after tomorrow – today I will first tell you what I like about the election and why I have decided to devote a mini series to it on my blog.
Photos of cars, the election logo and a question mark
The seven nominees for the title Car of the Year 2020
School diaries
In my article about the Renault Mégane Scénic you could already read how I predicted in my school diary that that car would become the Car of the Year 1997, and in another piece I called the Peugeot 405 "in a sense the Car of the Century", because it earned the most points ever when it was crowned Car of the Year 1988. My school diary of '95/'96, however, is not the only proof of my interest in the election - and that 'interest' is an understatement. Apparently I thought the election was very important, because in my school diary of the next school year, of course again a car diary, I filled two pages with information about the election.
Page from a school diary with an overview of CotY victories per brand
One of the pages from my school diary from '95/'96
PowerPoint and dial-up modem
A school diary of course only lasts one school year, and I wanted a more permanent overview, which I could supplement every year. Fortunately we got PowerPoint on our PC in the late nineties. It didn't take long for me to make a schedule with every year's top three of the Car of the Year election. Nowadays, this type of overview is available in several places on the internet, but at the time it wasn't. Moreover, the information on the internet was much more difficult to access, because I had to dial in for a connection. Dialing in meant telephone unavailability and internet at a telephone rate, so our allowed internet time was limited. The allowed internet time too, for that matter, because the sound of the modem was not to be missed. And if you covered the modem for sound insulation, the telephone bill would betray you afterwards...
Slide from a PowerPoint with photos of cars and achieved position and points
A slide from the overview that I made in PowerPoint as a teenager
Subjective, but not meaningless
So for technical reasons alone, I had enough reasons to make an overview myself. In addition, I attached great importance to the results of the election. Slightly naive, I assumed as a child and adolescent that the winners were really the best cars of the moment. In reality, that's a bit more nuanced obviously, because such an election is quite subjective. Still, it says something about what is currently going on in the car world and so I continued to find it an interesting phenomenon. And this blog is of course a good reason to do something with the overviews I have made over the years.

Sources