At an award ceremony held at the Tokyo International Exchange Center in Tokyo Bay, the MX-5 sports car tallied 442 votes, beating out the Honda
S660 mini-coupe by 41 votes when the last of the 60 juror’s votes were read out. The BMW 2-Series, which finished in third place, totaled 177 votes to pick up the Import Car of the Year gong.
This win gives the Hiroshima-based carmaker back-to-back Car of the Year trophies after it captured the major prize last year with the Mazda2. In accepting the award, Mazda’s vice president in charge of product planning and head of the company’s Skyactiv technology R&D, Kiyoshi Fujiwara, said, “We went through some tough times during the financial crisis and 2011 earthquake, but we stuck to our founding principles and created a winning formula. We think the jurors’ response to our MX-5 shows that sports cars are making a strong comeback in Japan. This award means a lot to our development team.”
A quick examination of the results shows just how close the voting progressed until the winner was finally announced. The Mazda MX-5 polled the maximum 10 votes from 25 of the 60 jurors while the Honda S660 picked up 10 votes each from 22 jurors. Each juror is allocated 25 votes, must give 10 votes to their most highly evaluated model and spread their remaining 15 votes among their next best four cars.
The Suzuki Alto picked up the Small Mobility award, while the TeslaModel S, entering the award process for the first time in Japan, won the Innovation award. A split in the voting between several sporty models, including the MX-5, S660 and Model S, saw no model gain the necessary 200 votes to win the Emotional award, so that trophy was not awarded this year.
The Car of the Year Japan steering committee’s Special Award was presented to two companies this year. The first award went to Japan’s largest car importer Yanase, an acknowledgement of its 100th year in promoting import car culture nationwide. The second trophy was presented to the Toyota Mirai – which did not meet the criteria to enter the main award – for its technological achievement in advancing the spread of hydrogen powered fuel-cell vehicles.
For more information about the Car of the Year Japan awards, go to jcoty.org
