Forget BMW. Forget Honda. Europe Car of the Year Says Fiat Makes the Finest Cars
December 03, 2007

By Richard Feast

LONDON -- Orders for the Fiat 500, the cute little city car that was recently named 2008 Car of the Year in Europe, suggest it will be popular with buyers.

That would make a change. All too frequently in the past, the model COTY judges pronounced ‘the best’ in a given year proved anything but when a more important group of judges had their say: the people who buy new cars each year.

There is clearly a significant divide between what critics acclaim and what consumers will part with their money for. It is evident in many spheres. Theatre critics applaud challenging new dramas, but what the public wants are frothy, tried-and-trusted musicals. Their literary peers recommend Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon but buyers in their millions prefer Dan Brown and Robert Ludlum.

COTY, at least in Europe, is the automotive equivalent of the United Nations – a high-minded ideal with little relevance in the real world. Indeed, it is hard to escape the notion that critics in general are insular, self-perpetuating oligarchies, whereas buyers are the enfranchised voters of the consumer world.

And before anyone gets too carried away by Fiat’s achievement with the 500, history points to a more worrying flaw in the whole annual charade. There has been an astonishing lack of balance in the distribution of these gongs over the years.

No other firm has as many European COTYs in its trophy cabinet as Fiat Group Automobiles, which makes Alfa Romeos and Lancias as well as Fiats. The 500 is Fiat’s ninth win and the group’s 12th. In other words, Fiat has collected a fourth of all awards since the contest started in 1964.

By contrast, much-admired names like BMW and Honda have never won the award in Europe. It is curious, then, that Honda recently took the latest COTY in Japan (with the Fit/Jazz) for the fifth time in 10 years.

Back in Europe, Peugeot-Citroen is closest to Fiat, but its eight awards are misleading. Two of Citroen’s three awards (for the GS and CX) were achieved before it was taken over by Peugeot. Chrysler-Europe was responsible for two other winners (Alpine and Horizon) before it too was bought by Peugeot.

Renault has six awards and Ford five. Opel, GM’s main European brand, Toyota and Audi (a VW group nameplate) have two each.

So how did the world’s other car companies compare?

They found little favor with COTY juries over the years. Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Porsche and the Volkswagen brand have one each. The more recent of Audi’s two wins was a quarter of a century ago. Mercedes collected its trophy just as the Watergate scandal was coming to the boil.

Still, that’s better than BMW, Honda, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lexus, Mazda, Mini, Mitsubishi, Saab, Seat, Skoda, Subaru, Suzuki, Volvo and others. None of them has an award. Any Korean or modern day Chrysler models? Don’t make me laugh.

When some of the world’s most admired engineering companies, and some of the most commercially successful, are consistently overlooked, the validity of the award has to be suspect. The lesson must be not to take the European COTY too seriously.

It is not as if the 58 jurors from 22 countries are ignorant bar room bores. Far from it. They’re serious car nerds, the Screaming Eagles of the European automotive press corps. Their objective is to “acclaim the most outstanding new car to go on sale in the 12 months preceding the date of the title.”

But, living in a privileged vacuum of private flights, courtship dinners and product launches in exotic locations, the judges’ understanding of the real world of car ownership is tenuous.

They identified sales successes like the 1993 VW Golf, 1995 Fiat Punto and 1997 Renault Scenic. But they overlooked previous Golfs, the 1983 Peugeot 205, 1988 VW Passat and 1998 Peugeot 206. Each was a seminal model for its maker and a tremendous hit with customers.

Of course, COTY judges can choose only from the new cars on their lists each year. That explains why old dogs like the Austin 1800, Chrysler/Talbot Horizon, Citroen XM, Ford Granada, Lancia Delta, NSU Ro80 and Renault 9 (remember the ghastly AMC Alliance/Encore?) are among past winners. (The AMC Alliance, by the way, won the Motor Trend Car of the Year award in the U.S.)

Not that a model has to be truly awful to win. Recent winners include plenty of very ordinary models like the Ford S-Max, Renault Clio, Fiat Panda, Renault Megane and Peugeot 307.         

And Fiat’s plethora of wins is definitely no indicator of its business performance. The firm’s market share was one of the highest in Europe in 1990 at more than 13 percent. A decade later it was down to 10 percent. In the first three-fourths of this year, it was 8.1 percent.

The basic cause was a series of new models – some with COTY endorsements – that bombed in the market.

My theory is that all those awards contributed to Fiat’s decline. The company became complacent. It believed its products were better than they were because it owned far many COTYs than any of its rivals. 

Reality finally caught up. Fiat’s car business became so bad that it was forced to instigate a life-or-death refinancing and management shake-up in 2002-03. Its automobiles division is seemingly now on the mend. The 500, the company says, is part of the product-led healing.

The latest European award started with 33 entries, of which seven went into the finals. The 500 emerged the clear winner, well ahead of the Mazda 2. The voting effectively rendered the Ford Mondeo, Kia Cee’d, Nissan Qashqai, Mercedes-Benz C-Class and Peugeot 308 also-rans.

But if the overall result was conclusive, there was plenty of dissent in the ranks – and not a little chauvinism. All six Italians on the panel voted for the Fiat, for example. The German group gave the Mercedes 30 points between them, while the similarly sized Italian delegation thought the model was worth five points.

The Fiat achieved seven maximums (10 points), the Mazda four and the Ford one. At the same time, five judges saw fit to give the Fiat only two points each and one gave it zero. According to two other judges, the Mazda rated a single point between them. 

And did the Mercedes really warrant a collective 15 points between 25 judges, or the Peugeot a total of 13 points between another 29 judges? Were they that much worse then the Fiat?

Now car buyers will have their say. Commerce is the great leveller. The democracy of the marketplace will decide whether COTY’s experts are right this time -- where they have been so misguided in the past.

How They Finished in 2008 in the Points Standings
Fiat 500             385
Mazda 2             325
Ford Mondeo      202
Kia Cee’d           166
Nissan Qashqai   147
Mercedes-Benz C 128
Peugeot 308         97

Winners and Losers Over the Years
Fiat Automobiles 12
Peugeot-Citroen   8*
Renault                6
Ford                     5
VW group              4**
British Leyland      3
GM/Opel               2
Toyota                  2
Mercedes-Benz      1
Nissan                  1
Porsche                1
Everyone else       0
*  includes two each by Citroen and Chrysler-Europe before their purchase by Peugeot.
** includes two wins by Audi and one by NSU

Posted by Michelle Krebs at 7:14 AM under Commentary , Companies , Featured | Comments (4) | digg this | Seed Newsvine