No other event or comparison test comes close to delivering what Car of the Year does

strewn with cars that promised much only to fail spectacularly in the COTY torture chamber – but past winners such as 2016’s Mazda ND MX-5 and 2009’s VW Golf weren’t what you’d call surprises.

This year, though, things are different: there’s no clear front-runner. It’s an open field with everything from the Tesla Model X to the fifth-gen Suzuki Swift, and HSV’S brilliant GTS-R W1 (see sidebar) to the Hyundai i30 (sans the i30 N hot hatch, sadly, which doesn’t make the cut-off date) vying for our top honour. Perhaps the closest to a bookie’s pick are the Alfa Romeo Giulia and the Kia Stinger, both having convincingly won recent Wheels comparison tests to make them genuine contenders to take a first COTY win for their brand. If Mazda’s muchimproved CX-5 triumphs however, that will be three wins on the trot for Hiroshima.

Of course, all this speculation is moot: the COTY process – a method that’s been honed with scientific precision over 50 years and is built on the five enshrined criteria of Function, Safety, Value, Technology and Efficiency – will spit out the deserving winner. What really has me looking longingly at my office door, wishing I was already many kilometres away, at Holden’s Lang Lang proving probably tell my wife, and you won’t have to wait much longer. Our COTY announcement is being brought forward this year with the winner revealed in our January 2018 issue, on sale Jan 24.