Professional Driver Car of the Year Awards 2017

The new Volvo XC60 was amongst the 2017 Professional Driver Car of the Year winners

The eighth outing for the Professional Driver Car of the Year Awards sees wins for Hyundai, Volvo, BMW, Mercedes and Ford as real world winners.

You do sometimes wonder how the seemingly endless array of ‘Car of the Year’ awards really reach the conclusions on the winners they do, and what exactly are the criteria they use?

Are the awards entirely subjective, or can the judging panel draw on real objective substance to award wins for a car even if it doesn’t fit their own subjective opinions?

With that in mind, the awards from Professional Driver Magazine – the magazine of the UK’s chauffeur and private hire industry – for their Cars of the Year are perhaps one of the awards where the real world performance is more important than any individual’s prejudices.

So we should probably take notice when their awards arrive as a really good look at which cars work best in the real world – albeit ones designed to shift people around – so we thought a round-up of the award winners in 2017 would be interesting.

Professional Driver did things properly, with the shortlisted cars turning up for a full day of evaluation by more than 100 judges, using a circular road route with a variety of road types, a full walk-round inspect and a two page report expected from every judge.

It’s a thorough process and resulted in awards we can’t find much fault with, with Mercedes grabbing two awards, BMW the same and Hyundai, Volvo and Ford one each.

So if you’re looking for the right car for ferrying around folk, you won’t go far wrong if you pick from the winners below.