Jaguar XF – Women’s World Car of the Year

The Jaguar XF wins the Women's World Car of the Year Award

The Jaguar XF has won the first Women’s World Car of the Year Award, beating the Volvo XC60 and Volkswagen Golf Diesel.

This month has been a bit of a Jaguar good news fest. We reported that Jaguar Land Rover are back in profit, sales of Jaguar have gone through the roof and that Jaguar has topped the J.D. Power survey 2009 in the US. Oh, and that nice Mr Jay-Z has been using the new XJ in a video. So what more do Jaguar want? Yet another Car of the year award, perhaps?

Well, they’ve come close with the announcement that the Jaguar XF has won the first Women’s World Car of the Year Award. It would seem that a bunch of women car journos decided that there wasn’t a big enough female voice in the car world, so they got together to give awards from the female perspective. Which we understand. We try to get a balance at Cars UK by having a female voice as well as the usual middle-aged male petrol-head voice. And we also try to get a younger female opinion – insurance permitting.

So we applaud the Women’s World Car of the Year Award as highly relevant. The panel were looking at value for money; child friendliness was a consideration, along with “sex appeal” and carbon footprint, the judges put particular emphasis on vehicle driveability and comfort. So, a pretty sensible set of criteria.

The WWCOTY awards were organized by Sandy Myhre of New Zealand, who said:

“A woman’s voice in the car industry and via the media is hard to find.

That a luxury car has won the supreme award in the Women’s World Car of the Year is an unexpected result, given the ubiquitous ’shopping basket’ is what many in the car industry consider to be a woman’s car. But judges clearly considered the Jaguar XF to be well-constructed, competent, comfortable, a combination of sport and luxury, and ideal for women.”

Apart from the Jaguar XF winning overall World Car of the Year, the category winners were:

• Family Car of the Year: Volvo XC60 (Runner-up: Honda Accord)
• Sports Car of the Year: Audi TTS (Runner-up: Mazda MX-5)
• Economy Car of the Year: Volkswagen Golf Diesel (Runner-up: Ford Fiesta)
• Luxury Car of the Year: Jaguar XF (Runner-up: Audi A6)

Which from a middle-aged male perspective is not a million miles away from what I’d have chosen. So either I have a well-hidden female side or a good car is a good car – whatever your gender.