New Car Awards 2026: the winners
All the winners and highly commended cars at the 2026 Auto Express New Car Awards.
Welcome to the Auto Express New Car Awards, the definitive verdicts on the best new cars of every type on sale today. 12 months of extensive testing by our expert road testers over thousands of miles went into choosing the winners in 26 separate categories. If you’re buying a new car in the UK today, these are the models we recommend, the ones you should not ignore.
Auto Express’s New Car Awards are a very big deal. I’m one of British motoring journalism’s older guard, and the NCAs (as we call them) started in 1993, five years before I got into this game.
Despite my venerable years, I’m the Auto Express new boy, having joined last year. That enables me to have a fairly objective, semi-outsider status on the NCAs, having enviously monitored them from my old title. There we had a very inconsistent attitude towards awards and eventually gave up on them.
Not Auto Express. It’s made some absolutely brilliant calls for its Car of the Year, such as the ground-breaking 2001 MINI – amusingly overlooked by Europe’s Car of the Year jury in favour of Peugeot’s 307. Insert rolling-on-the-floor-laughing emoji here.
Or how about this for a purple patch? 2010 Skoda Yeti – a brilliant compact SUV that was way ahead of its time; 2011 Range Rover Evoque – the style icon went up like a firework and ‘inspired’ (ahem) the Jaecoo 7. And crowning Tesla’s Model 3 in 2019 – when Elon Musk was palatable – captured the significance of that electric vehicle.
Will this year’s Car of the Year stand the test of time? History will judge. But it’s a choice that is utterly in keeping with Auto Express’ role as the champion of Britain’s everyday car buyers.
What I love about this brand is its unerring consumer focus: that’s why we alone do proper product testing, week in, week out. Why we run the Driver Power survey, this year collating how more than 100,000 owners feel about their cars to arm you with essential buying advice. And why we toil to put together the NCAs.
You, dear readers, are a passionate, knowledgeable and discerning lot. And this year’s Car of the Year has been designed and engineered by your kindred spirits. Our champ is a brilliant all-rounder that beat off the challenge of 20 other award-winning cars to become an utterly deserving Car of the Year.
So what are you waiting for? Check out the 2026 New Car Award winners below…
See all the winners...
Click on the gallery below to see all the winners of our 2026 New Car Awards...
You can find all the information on our New Car Awards 2026 winners and the reasons why we chose them on the pages below. Just follow the links to read more…
New Car Awards 2026: the winners
Special edition of Auto Express
For the full New Car Awards experience, make sure you pick up a copy of our special 2026 New Car Awards collectors' edition of the Auto Express magazine, which is available in shops now.
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