Here's our annual round-up of 2025's star cars
It is a sign of the times when every car in the 2025 Year in Cars is electrified in one form or another.
The spectrum ranges from BEVs (Battery Electric Vehicles, like the AVATR 11, Kia EV5 and Jaecoo J6) to a plug-in hybrid petrol-electric with a rorty V8 (Urus SE, we’re looking at you!), all the way through to a full-on hybridised eTurbo’d sportscar (992.2 Turbo S) and a hybrid-hypercar (hello Ferrari F80) with a side of motorsports madness!
In alphabetical order, here are our star cars:
1. AVATR 11
2. Ferrari F80
3. Jaecoo J6 RWD
4. Kia EV5 Earth
5. Lamborghini Urus SE
6. Porsche 911 Turbo S T-Hybrid
We’re in the second installment of our Year in Cars. This annual supplement celebrates the most emotionally intriguing cars that gave us the feels – by our reckoning – that were launched within the qualifying year.
If you’ve been following us since the first iteration of Year in Cars, you’ll realise we do not create categories for the sake of justifying a winner, much less crown one car as the best. We hope that there is a special quality about our featured cars beyond being the fastest, the most expensive, the most best-selling etc.
The deeper one delves into any emotional rabbit-hole (such as the soulful cars we love for instance), the harder it becomes to pick the best of anything. Besides, this concept ceases to have any meaning when you realise there are too many variables, which is the occupational hazard of accumulating a store of too much knowledge. This is exactly why we have a selection of our spotlight cars, instead of just one.
Why? Well, like all the soulful topics that fire-up the collective emotions — be it food, music and art – life isn’t coloured in blacks or whites, but many shades of grey. Between abstract, modern and impressionist, or classical, indie and hip-hop, the myriad forms of art and music are so transcendental we would never be able to pick just one.
As another example, this writer enjoys both white and black chye tow kway, but which do I like best? They're both good and let’s just say this beloved hawker dish is offered with a “Michael Jackson” option for a reason!
Once you take the empirical and political elements out of the picture, cars become a deeply emotional topic, because you’re ultimately attracted to the feels they hit you with. Otherwise you run the risk of them slipping into appliance status that are devoid of any personality, which is a real danger given the new wave of new brands that is self-driving itself onto our sunny island.
In a nutshell, the featured cars that have tickled our fancy enough to leave their mark in this year’s edition of Year in Cars have made this writer’s final cut — nothing less, but certainly a whole lot more.
