Jaguar I-Pace luxury SUV crowned as World Car of the Year
By Paul Gover, April 23 2019
Jaguar is the car star of 2019 after a stunning victory in the World Car of the Year award with its I-Pace SUV.
It’s a landmark event on the path to the electrification of motoring, as the I-Pace is the first battery electric car to claim the crown.
The I-Pace scored a surprising sweep of the top prizes in the contest, taking three major awards for the first time in the 15-year history of the world’s most important new-car contest.
Apart from its overall WCOTY victory, the I-Pace snared trophies for as Best Car Design and Best Green Car in a triumph for the British company’s engineers and its chief designer, Ian Callum.
This year's WCOTY crown was presented at the New York Auto Show, where Callum accepted the awards and observed that "electric vehicles offer designers unprecedented freedom to re-think the proportions, the profile and the packaging, and it’s an opportunity that my team has exploited in full."
The I-Pace is priced from $123,814 in Australia and, so far, more than 11,000 have been sold world-wide.
Road test: Here's why the Jaguar I-Pace is an EV milestone
Even so, there was still success for conventional cars as Audi claimed World Luxury Car with its elegant A7...
while McLaren took World Performance Car with the snarling low-slung 720S.
The importance of the WCOTY awards is their global reach, as they are judged by a worldwide panel of 86 leading motoring journalists from 24 countries [disclosure: the author of this article is one of two Australians on the judging panel].
Judging is also a months-long process which starts with dozens of contenders across the categories, before being honed down to just three finalists for each award. Judges are only permitted to score the cars they have driven.
As Motoring Editor for Executive Traveller, Paul Gover spends less time at his Gold Coast home than he does on the road (literally) test-driving the best of the four-wheel world.