The winners of the 2026 World Car Awards have been announced at this year’s New York International Auto Show (NYIAS), a few weeks after the top three finalists were revealed near the middle of March.
As always, the World Car of the Year award is the most coveted prize out of the six categories featured in the World Car Awards, and this year saw the first of BMW’s Neue Klasse models coming out on top. We are of course talking about the iX3, which not only represents the second consecutive World Car of the Year nomination for BMW, but also the brand’s second World Car of the Year win (its previous win was with the E90 3 Series)
The iX3 took the title ahead of the second-generation Hyundai Palisade and Nissan Leaf, the latter now a crossover in its latest generation. To add to BMW’s success, the iX3 was also named World Electric Vehicle of the Year, bringing the brand’s total number of awards won to 11 in the World Car Awards’ 22-year history. BMW board chairman Oliver Zipse was also honoured by being named World Car Person of the Year.
In other categories, the Lucid Gravity was named World Luxury Car ahead of the Cadillac Vistiq and Volvo ES90. Meanwhile, the fully electric Hyundai Ioniq 6 N is the World Performance Car of the Year to bring the total number of awards won by the South Korean automaker to nine. The Ioniq 6 N’s competition in this category both come with combustion engines: Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray and BMW M2 CS.
Moving on to the World Urban Car of the Year category, Nio’s Firefly won ahead of the second-generation Hyundai Venue as well as the Baojun Yep Plus (also known as the Chevrolet Spark EUV). The final category is World Car Design of the Year, with the Mazda 6e/EZ-6, a joint venture product between Mazda and Changan, beating out Kia’s PV5 – an electric van – and Volvo ES90. This year’s winners were chosen by a jury of 98 distinguished international automotive journalists from 33 countries.
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lol ix3 what a joke
Aduh another omputeh award that will only heavily favor omputeh-made cars even though they are highly subpar.
Really meaningless award.
Hyundai Ioniq 6 N, Mazda 6e, Firefly are omputih ?
Thing isn’t even on sale and can win car of the year, that tells you how meaningful this “award” is.