The Toyota Hilux Double Cab got the second step on the podium and third place went to the BMW 4 Series.

Given the lockdown, the 2021 South African Car of the Year winner was announced during a virtual awards ceremony that was streamed live on 27 September 2021.

Our 2021 South African Car of the Year category winners are:

• Budget Category: Toyota Starlet

• Compact Category: Hyundai Venue

• Compact Family Category: Peugeot 2008 SUV

• Family Category: Audi A4

• Premium Category: BMW 4 Series

• Adventure Category: Toyota Land Cruiser Prado

• Double Cab Category: Toyota Hilux Double Cab

• Performance Category: Porsche 911 Turbo S

• New Energy Category: Porsche Taycan

• Motor Enthusiast’s Choice: Mercedes-Benz E-Class

• Jurors Excellence Award: Peugeot 2008 SUV

The South African Car of the Year trophy, awarded since 1986, has evolved over the years (categories were introduced recently) and celebrates and rewards automotive excellence, according to the SAGMJ.

The 2021 SA Car of the Year (COTY) had its unique challenges. For the first time in the competition’s history, the scheduled two-day juror evaluation event could not take place. Thankfully, the SAGMJ had the foresight to create an ongoing online scoring system available to all South African Guild of Mobility Journalists’ (SAGMJ) members in 2019 based on scoring criteria that closely mirrored COTY’s voting criteria. The scoring system was initially created to build up a database of vehicles tested, their strengths, weaknesses and to be able to compare them to category contenders.

The expert COTY jurors had access to this scoring system and were encouraged to score vehicles as they experienced them on launches or as test-drive vehicles and to input scores and notes via the SAGMJ scoring system. The use of this ongoing scoring system was introduced to COTY jurors and trainee jurors as part of the COTY process before 2021.

“In the last two years, the public has become more involved in our COTY scoring/voting process. This voting counted towards the juror scores and effectively held the weight of a single juror. Having discovered that this made minimal impact, we wanted to encourage the public to be more involved and, as such, we felt that the public rightly deserved their own award - the Motor Enthusiast’s Choice Award,” says the statement.