Once upon a time in the land of long ago, the Wheels Car Of The Year used to be a prestigious title. However, the 2024 edition of this award, leaves me with a complete sense that it has now been rendered pointless. Why? Because each and every single thing on the list is pointless. Why bother to a award a something of the year if the entire list in uninspiring?
Of the shortlist of contenders for the win, there is the Ford Mustang Dark Horse, a stack of SUV things, and some variant of the Toyota Camry. At $111,000, the Mustang Dark Horse is only accessible to boring old people who are sitting on a stack of cash in the bank, and everything else is just meh. I can not even accuse this list of being vanilla, as vanilla is a delicious bean extract which people have fought over. This list is like drinking Colgate Total Control Diamond mouthwash and them permanently living with one of a stated side effects - a complete inability to taste anything at all. The list for the 2024 Wheels Car Of The Year is as delicious as sand.
Here's the fun thing, there are practically no fun cars on the road any more; and none that are reasonably accessible to young people. If you look at what used to be the market leaders and who filled out all top ten slots on monthly sales, then what used to be the big four is a sad sad sorry state.
Toyota does not sell a base model of any hatchback. The Yaris and the Corolla are only sold as GR Variants now and neither of them sell for less than $50k.
Ford does not sell any hatchback. Ford does not sell any sedan.
Mitsubishi does not sell any hatchback. Mitsubishi does not sell any sedan.
Holden does not sell any hatchback. Holden does not sell any sedan. Holden does not sell any cars.
If you look at the VFACTS data for November of 2024, then you see that all top ten slots of monthly sales are taken by meh SUV things and pickup trucks. I am glad that Mazda still sells the 2 because it is a brilliant little machine and if they drop it and the 3, then they tool will join the ranks of meh.
An an attempt to discern what went wrong, it is necessary to look at the state of the market as it currently exists. To that end, can there be a better symbol of what went wrong than the follow pictures?
This photo represents the modern Australian motoring market so very very well. On the right is a Holden VE Commodore SS Ute, which my August 2016 edition of Wheels magazine, tells me retailed for $39,990 (well, the VF did). On the left is a Chevrolet Silverado ZL1, which starts at $135,400. The Silverado if you allow for inflation, merely costs more than twice as much for a worse engineered, worse built, less competent, worse handling, physically bigger and somehow still manages to have a shorter tray bed, but comes with an even fatter pile of steaming ego enhancement.
In yet another case of proving what's good for General Motors is good for the USA, the General thought it a great idea after the then Treasurer Joe Hockey merely threatened to remove the subsidy, to completely abandon manufacturing in Australia. I have no doubt that the people at the Liberal Party thought that this a lovely turn of events in their continued quest to sell everything and everyone to their criminal friends for next to nothing; so having dumped car manufacturing subsidies off of the expense budget, they now get to yell at governments for lost revenue due to taxation write offs.
I should temper this with the statement that people like what they like and are allowed to like what they like. The gentleman who owns the Silverado (because there is no way in Hades, Sheol, Valhalla, or Vaucluse, is a lady) obviously liked the idea of a Silverado so much that he was willing to spend more than a hundred thousand dollarpounds on his brodozer. He was also willing to make the taxpayer wear roughly one third of that in foregone taxation, because there is also no way in Hades, Sheol, Valhalla, or Vaucluse that the owner of this thing actually bought this brodozer in his own name. This will have been ploughed through a business and claimed as a business expense; even though this has never ever seen anything remotely like a day's work.
Tucked under the bonnet of this Yankee Brodozer 9001 is the same LS3 6.3L V8 that did appear in the VF Commodore. As was repeatedly pointed out by publications like Road & Track, and the Kelley Blue Book (before magazine publishing also faceplanted), the VF Commodore despite the whinging of right-wing-nut-job Australians, was excellent. Actually to that point, no iteration of the Ford Taurus, no Five-Hundred, and no Mark IV Mondeo/Fusion, and no iteration of any W-Body GM Car, no Monte Carlo, no Lumina, and no Imapala from Gen-7 onwards, needed to exist. In all cases, the Australian equivalents of American cars, were always better built and better tested and better engineered. This came into exceedingly sharp focus when Ford floated the Taurus alongside the Falcon for a while and the 3.0L V6 Taurus managed to be more expensive and have sub-par build quality when compared to the 4.0L inline-6 Falcon.
However this post isn't merely about throwing hate at the big stupid truck which is incapable of actually being used for a day's work, but the fact that it never will be. The kind of person who owns this, is likely to pretend that they had dreams of owning a boat or going caravanning, in spite of the fact that even if they did own a boat or a caravan, they will almost never use them. Most cars spend about 90% of their lives idle anyway, and of that 10% of the time that it is used, likely 90% of that time is likely to be ever used for towing things.
Tradies use proper work trucks. People who want to tow things like a boat, get a diesel thing like a Landcruiser. This kind of thing is mostly bought by boors. And boorish they will be. The most common place that I am likely to see a Silverado is way east of the Red Rooster Line, where the absolute peanut of a driver which this thing is likely to be owned by, is using it to menace other road users. What I do not understand, is why this kind of brodozer became aspirational; and the thing of thing which Isuzu D-Max and Ford Ranger Raptor drivers want to upgrade to.
Maybe the person who owns this thing thinks it's fun? Maybe? This is never going to be used on a track day, or be a fun thing to burn down a B-Road in. Of the cars which were fun to used on a track days, fun things to burn a B-Road in, we return back to the beginning where either the base models of all of those cars have been withdrawn, or they've been withdrawn entirely to be replaced by a meh SUV thing.
Where is the next fun small hatchback? It doesn't exist; the old ones have to hang on. Where is the next fun sedan? It doesn't exist; they've all been deleted and discontinued and won't be replaced. Where is the next fun coupe? Unless you have six figures to throw away on a car, which normal people definitely do not, forget it.
Market forces have decreed that for the forseeable future, all there are are meh SUVs, a few pickup trucks, and the odd thing that hangs on like the Mazda MX-5 or the Toyota 86. Beyond that, I simply can not get excited enough about anything which made the short list of this year's Wheels Car Of The Year to care. To that end, I think that the winner of the Wheels Car Of The Year should be Unicorse.
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