2016 Yahoo Autos Ride Of The Year: Volvo XC90

For this year’s Yahoo Autos car judging competition, we challenged ourselves to come up with a new definition of a car award, one that reflects more accurately the kinds of vehicles that most people actually want to buy. As opposed to the vehicles that only car enthusiasts fall in love with, but make very little practical sense for the average consumer.

For the past week, Yahoo Autos has been revealing its 2016 Ride of the Year awards. Check out our choices for the Tech, Epic, Fresh and Savvy Rides of the Year.

And so we put on our thinking caps and realized our past awards were a little too narrow: Being a “car” award, we’d limited our search to vehicles that fit the definition of a car. But most Americans buy bigger vehicles than that. We want an SUV or a crossover to fit our families, our trips to Costco, our roadtrips across multiple states, and whatever else might come our way.

We’re also looking at a world coming soon in which actual driving may become a thing of the past. More and more automated driving technology is already starting to hit the road, and some carmakers say they’ll have fully autonomous vehicles available to the public by 2020. Which isn’t that far away.

So we settled on our new name, the Yahoo Autos Ride of the Year. For the overall Ride of the Year category, our formula involved weighing broad consumer appeal, technological advances that add to the driver experience rather than detract from it, cutting-edge safety technology, style and overall value.

Honestly, once we came up with the requirements for the overall award, the winner was an easy pick. If I’m being totally honest, our winner was my favorite going in. I tried to keep it to myself, because I didn’t want anyone to feel pressured to vote with me. After a day or two of testing, it seemed that everyone was in love with the 2016 Volvo XC90.