The farther we worked our way through the 31 nameplates and 40 total vehicles contending for the title of MotorTrend's 2024 SUV of the Year, the more this story wrote itself. A clear pattern emerged amongst a plurality of the field: "They caught up."
Whether it was a big people mover like the VW Atlas, a luxury EV like the Audi Q8, or basic transportation like the Chevrolet Trax, this group is defined by vehicles that are significantly better than the ones they replaced. Automakers rectified the glaring flaws in their old models with these new ones, a huge win for consumers: Having too many good choices is a nice problem.
Just being better than the old model, though, isn't necessarily enough to win our Golden Calipers. When the baseline is this high, you must dig a lot deeper to separate the good from the great. Some years, this is the result of too many viable candidates needing to be whittled down to an appropriate number of finalists. This year was the opposite.
Debating which of these myriad most improved candidates went far enough beyond fixing known issues to breaking new ground took, quite literally, hours. Where one judge saw an SUV that exceeded expectations, another saw one that didn't exceed them enough. Each vehicle that made it to the finalist round had to earn the right to be there at all, not just make the cut among an overcrowded field in need of winnowing.
A few of us would eat crow after making impassioned arguments on behalf of an SUV we thought was a no-brainer finalist, only to discover during our even more rigorous secondary evaluations in the real world that we'd missed the mark. It's the entire reason we do another round of finalist-only testing, to weed out vehicles that perform well in a controlled environment only to show their weaknesses in the chaos that is the American roadway system. Sometimes a borderline finalist really shows what it can do on the open road. Other times, like this year, it shows its butt.
Identifying the worthiest finalists wasn't our only headache-inducing challenge this year. With 16 vehicles—six plug-in hybrids and 10 EVs, an Of The Year competition record—needing to be plugged in regularly to perform their best (or at all), logistics are more complicated. Imagine charging at public stations on a road trip in a 10-EV convoy, with another half-dozen PHEVs following along hoping to jump in for some juice here and there.
Just finding that many working chargers in one place at one time is tough, even in EV-friendly California. Finding chargers with sufficient output to juice up the SUVs in a reasonable amount of time was at least as difficult as finding enough time for the PHEVs to slowly fill up on wall chargers and 50-amp outlets. Our circumstances are unique, but they reflect the reality at many public charging stations where drivers wait in long, slow lines for a plug to open.
Dealing with this on a regular basis changes the way you evaluate an EV. How much range is enough when public chargers are unreliable in both uptime and charging speeds? What kind of peak charging speed and total charging time are necessary to make up for shorter range, or can they? It may be easy to dismiss such concerns as applicable only on the statistically rare long-distance road trip, but with more and more EV buyers lacking the ability to charge at home, it's a problem for people who live in apartments and condos.
These topics, in addition to critical evaluations of ride, handling, refinement, build quality, technology, and more all featured in our finalist and winner discussions. More than anything, though, the winner had to run the gantlet of our six key criteria: advancement in design, efficiency, engineering excellence, performance of intended function, safety, and value. As always, we weighed each vehicle against those criteria in the context of its class and intended buyer. A winner must excel in as many of those categories as possible, ideally in all six, and do it better than the other finalists.
The ability of any SUV in any class, of any size and sticker price, to potentially win it all is well reflected in this year's finalists. Affordable commuters, pure luxury vehicles, big family haulers, and upwardly mobile premium vehicles are represented in gas, hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and pure electric configurations. It should be difficult for you not to find something interesting amongst such diversity of choices.
But there can be only one winner, and one of these vehicles hits the criteria harder than all the others. Every year, veteran judges make friendly wagers before the first evaluation loop. Every year, the competition breaks one of three ways: a winner will be obvious from day one; a handful of vehicles will fight viciously for the title; or it'll be wide open. This was a wide-open race. Check out our full 2024 SUVOTY coverage to discover which vehicles remained simply contenders, which had what it takes to separate themselves from a sea of most-improveds to become finalists, and which SUV went all the way.
