The World Car of the Year 2026 will be either that BMW iX3, Hyundai PalisadeorNissan Leaf.
With the announcement of these three finalists, it is no longer possible for Kia to take the top spot for the third time in a row. However, sister brand Hyundai still has a chance – and Kia could still win one of the other awards in the international competition.
After announcing the top 10 finalists for World Car of the Year in January, the jury has now announced the top three finalists in the world.
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This includes not only the aforementioned shortlist for the title of “World Car of the Year”, but also the three best finalists for the other categories of the competition.
General Motors (and its Chinese joint venture partners), BMW and Hyundai have the most top-three finishes with three each.
The overall winners will be announced on April 1 at the 2026 New York International Auto Show.
At the same time as the top 10 finalists were released in January – from which one winner will be chosen as the overall World Car of the Year – the jury also announced the top 5 finalists for four other awards.
The Audi A6/S6 e-tron and the Hyundai Ioniq 9 are now out of the race World electric vehicle.
Instead, the winner of this category will be one of the following:
The electric Audis and the A6/S6 series with combustion engines were also removed from the range World Luxury Car Competition. The winner of this award will be one of the following:
For World performance carthe Defender OCTA and the Mercedes-AMG GT63 Pro were thrown out of the race. The remaining finalists for this award are:
The Cosmopolitan car will not be the Alfa Romeo Junior or the Wuling Binguo/Ari Poly. The top three finalists for this award are:
Finally, the top three finalists for World Car Design of the Year Are:
A design panel of seven global design experts were asked to review each candidate and create a shortlist for the judges’ final vote for World Car Design of the Year.
With the exception of Baojun Yep Plus, Firefly and Lucid Gravity, all finalists are sold here or reserved for an Australian launch.
However, the shortlisted Hyundai Venue is a facelifted version sold in India.
The top three finalists for each award were selected by secret ballot, and the overall winners will also be determined in the same manner.
The jury consists of 98 automotive journalists from 33 countries, including Daily Sparkz Co-founder and presenter Daily Sparkz.
Korean brands have had great success in the World Car of the Year award this decade: Kia won three times – in 2020 with the Telluride and in 2024 and 2025 with the EV9 and EV3 respectively – and Hyundai won in 2022 (with the Ioniq 5) and 2023 (with the Ioniq 6).
The only non-Korean car to win World Car of the Year this decade was the Volkswagen ID.4 in 2021, although European, Japanese and Chinese brands were well represented in the other annual awards.
