Did Motor Trend Get It Right?

Did Motor Trend get it right by picking the Volkswagen Golf as it’s car of the year?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9Mr9vnnEJg

The 7th generation of the Volkswagen Golf family is Motor Trend Magazine’s Car of the Year winner for 2014. This is yet another award for Volkswagen just adding to it’s trophy cabinet for the Golf. Motor Trend chose the Volkswagen Golf over a number of other vehicles including the much loved baby of the Honda family the Fit. It also beat out Audi’s A3, The Hyundai Genesis which is one of of my favorites, and the much anticipated 2015 Ford Mustang. Also passed over were the Maserati Ghibli, Mercedes-Benz C-Class, and the Lexus RC-F.

All these vehicles were strong contenders. Which left some industry reporters questioning did Motor Trend get it right?

The morning of the announcement Motor Trend spokes people were on hand to explain their choice and justify why they thought the Golf family was a good choice for their car of the year. It used to be the case that even being nominated for car of the year by an organization like Motor Trend was big sales numbers for the car maker. Last year the Mazda3 was one of the final 3 making it to the list of Car of the Year nominees. Even thought it had no chance of winning the nomination did not visibly dramatically boost sales of the car.

It seems like Americans are not as influenced by awards as they once were. The Volkswagen Golf has been hot in Europe on the sales scale, but buyers have been less impressed with it this year in the United States. It has only returned sales figures figures that puts it in the middle of the pack for buyers. It’s a solid car, with a 40 year heritage and definitely should be on the short list of test drives for car shoppers this year.

This Volkswagen Golf GTI has been on sale since spring and was joined by the other family members later in the year. The base Golf starts just under $18,000. The GTI Electric Golf and Diesel Golf will be joined by a new Golf R in early 2015. So Please go out and test drive on and tell us if Motor Trend got it right.

Did Motor Trend Get It Right?