As another year draws to a close, it’s time to round up the very best new cars launched in the last 12 months for our annual Car of the Year awards. But in a sea of different new car awards, what makes The Car Expert Awards 2025 different?
Rather than just give you our opinion, we manually curate reviews and scores from 35 of the UK’s leading motoring websites (including our own), with more than 16,700 car reviews from all of these titles. In the past 12 months, we’ve added more than 1,000 new car reviews to our database – an average of 20 new reviews every week.
Every score from every review is fed into our sophisticated algorithm, which adjusts them for date and normalises them to account for all the different scoring systems used. That gives us a definitive score for every new car on sale in the UK. So our awards don’t just give you the opinion of one source, but a consensus of all the top motoring titles in the UK.
Unlike the latest version of our Expert Rating Index, which now includes Euro NCAP safety ratings, Green NCAP environmental ratings, running cost data and reliability data, our Awards continue to be based purely on media review scores. This is because these are all brand-new cars to the UK market and we simply don’t have all of that additional data for most of the contenders.
It’s been a bumper year for new car launches, with about 30% more models eligible for our Awards this year than we had last year. Our cut-off date is 31 October, so some of the cars eligible this year actually went on sale at the end of last year.
And the winner is…
Our Expert Rating Index, based on reviews from 35 of the UK’s best motoring websites, shows that electric vehicles are continuing to achieve better review scores than their petrol and diesel equivalents. This has been evident for the last few years, and has continued to be the case this year. And for the fourth year in a row, our overall winner is an electric car.
Based on all of the car reviews published by the UK motoring media over the last year, The Car Expert’s Car of the Year 2025 is the Kia EV3.
The Car Expert Car of the Year 2025: Kia EV3
The Kia EV3 isn’t just another bar-raising new car from Kia. It really shows how electric cars can be objectively superior to fossil-fuel cars in most of the ways that really count. It’s a compact SUV with more cabin and boot space than many larger vehicles. It’s smooth, quiet, comfortable and refined to drive. It has more than enough battery range for the vast majority of UK driving habits. It throws in plenty of standard kit at a very competitive price. And it’s intelligently designed for family car needs.
The Kia EV3 is a fabulous car and a worthy winner of The Car Expert’s Car of the Year 2025 award. It also picks up out Best Small Crossover 2025 award as well.
Kia is really knocking it out of the park these days. The EV3 is the second Kia in four years to win our coveted Car of the Year title, after the EV6 won two years ago. Meanwhile, the EV9 picks up our Best Large Car 2025 award, while the Niro EV won Best Small SUV two years ago. And in addition to our trophies, Kia’s current and former electric models have won a hatful of awards from other motoring titles, both here in the UK and around the world.
For most car brands, that would be enough, but Kia also has two more EVs – plus a major move into the light commercial vehicle market – on the way. The company certainly seems unstoppable at the moment, and is making a lot of European car companies look completely inadequate.
The Car Expert Awards 2025 – all the category winners
We’ve tweaked the award categories for this year to reflect the changing new car market. The old industry definitions of ‘car’ and ‘SUV’ are no longer really relevant, so we’ve had a rethink.
We still differentiate between ‘best small car’ and ‘best small crossover’, as there is a clear distinction between small hatchbacks and taller SUV-style vehicles. But for medium and large vehicles, the lines have become so blurred that it is better to group all different car types together. Instead, we’ve added ‘premium’ categories for medium and large cars, which better reflects how buyers look for cars.
A look back at previous results
* There was no Car of the Year 2023 as we changed the dating system
