Jaguar F-PACE is the Women’s World Car of the Year 2016

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The new Jaguar F-PACE is driving Jaguar’s sales to new heights, and has now been voted Women’s World Car of the Year 2016 to add to its accolades.

It’s really quite hard to find anything too negative to say about the new Jaguar F-PACE, especially when whatever shortcomings it does have are rendered almost irrelevant by its impact on the market for Jaguar.

We reported earlier this month that the F-PACE is now Jaguar’s best-selling car, the Germans love it and female buyers seem to be queueing up to get in to one. All of which must be rather pleasing for Jaguar, if not Land Rover.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the F-PACE has been declared the 2016 Women’s World Car of the Year and, unsurprisingly, the Women’s World SUV/Crossover of the year too.

Of course, the F-PACE win is not a first for Jaguar, as the first year of the WWCOTY saw the Jaguar XF win the gong, and the Range Rover Evoque did the same in 2012, but it’s a good gong for the F-PACE to grab with Jaguars being traditionally seen as men’s cars, and this award proves the F-PACE is mould-breaking for Jaguar in more ways than one.

Jaguar did what they felt they needed to and rolled out the women’s voice at JLR to express their pleasure, with Fiona Pargeter (Head of Global PR) purring appropriately about the F-PACE in general, but Anna Gallagher (Jaguar Launch Manager) putting perspective on the F-PACE’s appeal to women. She said:

We are very proud of this award as female buyers were at the heart of the F-PACE design from day one. Through customer clinics and data we ensured that we created a distinctive vehicle that would appeal to all lifestyles.

Our teams worked hard on the features that appeal to both male and female customers, to deliver the best mix of performance, design and practicality.

We chatted to Sandy Myhre – founder of the WWCOTY – when it launched in 2009, and from a perspective where the gender balance at Cars UK is just about neutral we were very happy to see this award launched, and pleased to see its flourished in the last seven years.

And we have to confess we’ve found it easier to agree with the WWCOTY award winners than many higher profile awards.