Motoring

Australia's Best Cars 2018

blue hyundai tucson parked next to water at sunset

RACV

Posted June 22, 2018

In the market for a new set of wheels? Find your perfect vehicle among the Australia’s Best Cars winners for 2018.

Australia’s Best Cars (ABC) – the national vehicle appraisal program that does your car-buying homework for you – is back.

Eight judges, representing all state and territory auto clubs, have examined hundreds of vehicles in 15 categories – not just new releases, but vehicles you can walk into a showroom and buy today. It’s a consumer-focused program designed to help people buy the very best car for them.


The vehicles are scored relative to their competitors in up to 21 areas depending on the class. Our judges have done the legwork for you, gathering the facts and figures then crunching the numbers in areas including pricing, depreciation, insurance costs, standard features, safety and fuel consumption. Then their expertise is put to work, as they rigorously debate the merits of each car in subjective areas including comfort, build quality and drivability. A weighting system sorts out the relativity of each section depending on the needs of each class.

Buyers have vastly differing needs and tastes, which is why the scoring table for the top three in each class shows the strengths of each vehicle.

Our judges drive tens of thousands of kilometres across the year examining every aspect of a vehicle’s features and performance. And in a testing phase in May at the Australian Automotive Research Centre near Anglesea, they put a selection of the top cars through their final paces. Over four days of road-wrangling they encountered rain, sunshine, mud, dry roads and wet – “everything but snow”, says Greg.