This was always the plan. In adapting our long-running Best Driver’s Car program into Performance Vehicle of the Year, we chose the word “vehicle” very deliberately. Performance isn’t limited to coupes, sedans, or even SUVs, nor is it restricted to the pavement. Now, with a new venue and expanded parameters, we’ve finally realized the dream of a high-performance vehicle competition that doesn’t discriminate.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that coupes and sedans are in decline, that SUVs and trucks are on the rise, that factory-built high-performance off-road vehicles are the hot new segment of the market, and that we would be fools to ignore the above.

“Performance” has always been a somewhat nebulous concept when it comes to automobiles, but we consider it synonymous with speed. Where you’re hauling ass is irrelevant. Big horsepower, specialty suspension, and big brakes are as vital to a supercar on a racetrack as they are to a desert-running pickup truck, merely differently adapted for the job at hand.

Semantics aside, the market has spoken, and it’s about time competitions like ours catered to all types of factory-built and warrantied performance vehicles, not just the ones we traditionally think of as sports cars and supercars. Reworking our evaluation program to include them, though, was easier said than done.

Including sporty roadgoing SUVs was easy, and we did so straight away. They can be evaluated in the same environments as sports cars and supercars. Adding off-road trucks and SUVs to the mix, though, would prove far more difficult. As always, to even be invited they would need to be all-new or substantially updated like every competitor in our Of The Year competitions. We also resolved early on that if we were going to do this, we were going to do it right, and that meant the off-roaders needed to go off-road.

2024 PVOTY: Winner | Finalists | Contenders

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While we’re spoiled for desert here in Southern California, finding a bit of it we could use to build a credible but safe high-speed off-road course that was also near a paved racetrack where the rest of the vehicles would be tested proved difficult, hence why we’ve only just now pulled it off in the third running of Performance Vehicle of the Year. Our saving grace: Chuckwalla Valley Raceway in Desert Center, California.

We’ve long been familiar with Chuckwalla, but because it’s significantly farther out in the desert than other local tracks, we haven’t used it as much for our tests, videos, and competitions. But in addition to being a delight to work with, the track and its staff were able to provide what no other facility could: an infield dirt course designed in cooperation with Lamborghini for the global launch of the Huracán Sterrato. Not only could they offer both paved and dirt road courses, but Chuckwalla’s dirt was also designed specifically for expensive high-speed off-roaders with low clearance, so it would be safe for any off-roader we threw at it, including, incidentally, a Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato.

It wasn’t the only special accommodation we needed. With the restrooms located halfway across the paddock from the air-conditioned classroom that served as our base, we hit up Honda for a Motocompacto electric scooter to use as our support vehicle. Early returns suggest this was at least as good for employee morale as getting to drive supercars at a racetrack and call it work.

To ensure we wouldn’t be putting human or mechanical well-being at risk, we ran the on-road vehicles first on a clean track. Once every judge had driven every vehicle hard, we sent out the off-roaders. To get a complete driving impression, we’d run part of the lap on pavement, divert off onto the dirt course, then re-enter the pavement for a couple more paved corners. After all, even an off-roader is going to spend most of its life on pavement between trails, so how it drives on asphalt matters, too. Separating the two lapping sessions ensured supercars didn’t have to contend with pickups merging onto the track or losing grip on all the dirt tracked onto the pavement.

Including off-roaders wasn’t the only adjustment we made this year. We started at the track instead of on the street, as you already know, to weed out vehicles that only impress on the street and can’t hack it on the track.

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We also carried on with our adjusted six criteria. (Last year we replaced the Safety criterion of Car/Truck/SUV of the Year with Driver Confidence and Engagement.) Our reasoning is simple: Many high-performance vehicles aren’t crash-tested, so there’s very little empirical data, if any, to base our judging on. We’ve also long recognized there’s more to a performance vehicle than numbers. How the driver feels is difficult if not impossible to measure, but confidence in the vehicle is essential in high-speed driving, and engagement is fundamental to our emotional connection with a vehicle. Without either, the experience is lacking if not outright ruined. For this, we rely on our judges’ combined decades of experience on roads, off-road, and at the track.

Whittling down our 21 contenders to seven finalists wasn’t any easier than in our single-body-type competitions. As always, each contender is considered individually and compared not against each other but rather our criteria: Advancement in Design, Driver Confidence and Engagement, Efficiency, Engineering Excellence, Performance of Intended Function, and Value. Our Of The Year competitions are not direct comparisons, but we do consider each vehicle in relation to its segment. To be a finalist and to eventually win, a vehicle must score well on our criteria and do so better than other vehicles in its class.

This generally requires hours of debating, sometimes in a circle, often with illustrations and hand gestures, and always with handwringing over vehicles right on the cusp of making the finalist cut or taking home the trophy. At the end of each process, the majority rules.

Before we choose the winner from our finalist pool, though, we must drive the hopefuls in the real world. Owing to our change of venue, an entirely new evaluation route was required, one that offered a blend of interstates, meandering country highways, city traffic, and glorious mountain roads. It would need both good and bad pavement, hot and cold temperatures, and plenty of elevation change. It would also need easily accessible EV fast chargers.

This year’s route took us west across the desert, south along the shores of the Salton Sea, through the middle of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, then north up into the Peninsular and Transverse Mountain ranges along some of California’s best roads before commuting back to our El Segundo headquarters near the Pacific Ocean. In all, we’d drive nearly 350 miles, dipping below sea level and climbing to more than 7,000 feet in elevation, from searing desert to a freak late-season rain-turned-snow flurry in the San Gorgonio Mountains, which admittedly looked cool on camera as we splashed the 911 Dakar through a shallow water crossing just off the main road.

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Along the way, we picked up a fan who followed us for dozens of miles, blew the minds of some elementary school kids in a tiny mountain town, somehow avoided the attention of the constabulary, and lost a Porsche windshield wiper when it struck a GoPro mount and flew away. Like we said, the rain and snow in early May were a surprise. Still, a DIY mono wiper mod and a rock chip in the Ferrari’s windshield were the extent of the road rash, a reasonably minor toll after two days of lapping and hundreds of miles on the road.

After 15 hours behind the wheel with our finalists, and memories of two days lapping at Chuckwalla still fresh in our minds, we knew them inside and out. We knew how these vehicles perform in every environment they were designed for and how easy they are to live with when transiting between those environments. All that was left to do was to argue some more, agree the Honda Motocompacto “support vehicle” was the universal favorite, then vote for our winner.

It was a long, difficult, and not always paved road getting here, but we’re proud to present you with the most comprehensive competition between this year’s best performance vehicles of all body styles, powertrain types, ground clearances, and intended purposes. Not just the ones that appeal to track rats, dirt heads, or weekend warriors, but all enthusiasts. We hope you like it, and please write our bosses letters of effusive praise and demands we keep doing this, and maybe ask for a bigger budget, too. Baby needs a new pair of driving shoes and perhaps a set of all-terrain tires, too.