Petrolhead Nirvana [COTY2016] : Cars of the Year 2016 Intro

By davidkhoo, 17 April 2017

Singapore – What started as a lark four-ish years ago has become something of an annual tradition for us, because we realised that orchestrating something on such a scale still gives us and the photo team a nice buzz.

Sure it would have been a lot easier for us to simply adopt the annual UK feature and be done with it, but hey, different strokes for different folks. Besides, we didn’t think it would be fair to our readers to not have something uniquely local, with a selection that is more relevant to the Singaporean palate.

Our Cars of the Year gang-bang is a straightforward affair compared to the other local titles.

Why ‘Cars’ (and no, it’s not a typo)? Well, we don’t single out a victor, because that doesn’t make any sense – after all, how can a single ‘best’ car mean the same thing to everybody?

Also, the cars have to be available for sale in the qualifying year and the Ed has to have driven them all at some point, because we don’t make it a habit of repeating all the fluff from the press releases.

Neither do we impose price limits on the awardees at either ends of the spectrum; an affordable car that manages to tickle our fancies has the same chance of appearing in our awards as that big-sticker exotic – long-time readers will recall the BMW i3 and 116d in the 2014 and 2015 awards respectively. And conversely, a big-sticker exotic (or two) can just as easily be left out, because well, it didn’t..

Our selection of eight cars are our personal favourites from 2016, and spans Q50 Red Sport to 911 R and DB11. If somehow it’s not clear, the awardees are performance-oriented in one form or another, but they aren’t just blandly fast cars either or they wouldn’t be here.

We’re looking for a single spark or all-out brilliance in certain cases to really catch our attention, so some of the awardees might well be more controversial than others, because we follow our instincts and not just the herd.

However, trust us if it’s there, because our Singapore-style Cars of 2016 is made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts...

In alphabetical order, our list for the 2017 Cars of the Year (click the model name to link directly to the respective article):

1) Aston Martin DB11

2) Audi R8 V10 

3) BMW M3 Heritage Edition Singapore Collection 'Dakar Yellow'

4) Ferrari 488 Spider

5) Infiniti Q50 Red Sport

6) Lexus GSF

7) Porsche 911 (type 991) R

8) Range Rover SVR

PHOTOS Zotiq Visuals

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