10Best

10 Best just turned 40, and like many 40-year-olds, it's going through a time of reflection and reassessment. 10Best assures us this is not a midlife crisis but an evolution.

- Tony Quiroga  

For the past few years, we've experimented with allowing trucks and SUVs to claim spots on our list of 10. Combining them grew from a desire to give readers the most complete advice on what to buy and what to lust over. But picking fewer than 10 cars never felt right and led to many intraoffice squabbles. This year, we're separating cars from everything else. It's a move that will give shoppers a more comprehensive look at the entire vehicle landscape while allowing us to celebrate cars that we love. Next month you'll see a 10Best list for trucks and SUVs.

The next 16 pages are a celebration of sedans, hatchbacks, two-seaters, sports cars, and an electric sports sedan. Much of the list will be familiar to our readers, because 10Best isn't just about what's new this year, it's about the best that's on sale.

A few rules apply, though. Every car on the list has to go on sale by January 31, and as always, we set a price cutoff, not only to remain relevant but with the expectation that an expensive car had better be damn special. Inflation has bumped up the price of a new car, and thus our cutoff to a Chevrolet Corvette Z06-size $110,000. We assure you that's totally a coincidence.

Car and Driver isn't an autocracy, which is ironic because autos are what we're about. After a week of driving every new car that meets our criteria, we vote on a scale from zero to 100. As in figure skating, we throw out the high and low votes and average the remaining scores.

From there, someone with mad Microsoft Excel skills sorts the list, and we have the 10Best cars of 2023.-Tony Quiroga  

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