Women’s World Car of the Year award had just one “affordable” EV. What were they thinking?

Only three fully-electric vehicles – two of them in the super-expensive premium EV segment – were voted in the top six best Women’s World Car of the Year (WWCOTY) for 2022, raising serious questions about what criteria were used in the awards.

The all-electric BMW iX, Audi e-Tron and Ford Mach e all made the top six finalists for the award, but it was the Peugeot 308 that nabbed the top title, while the Kia Sportage won best SUV title and a hybrid Jeep Wrangler 4xe won best 4×4 award.

The Peugeot apparently won the top title because it is an affordable car with a small 1.2 litre engine, and will be available in a different range of powertrain, including an electric option in 2023.

But the decision is a hard one to swallow, given the fact only one “affordable” EV option made it to the finalists list, and particularly because the awards have been released to coincide with International Women’s Day, and the auto industry is already under-represented by women.

Of the three EVs on the WWCOTY list, only the Ford Mach-e is priced from less than $US50,000. While not available in Australia, a quick search shows the base model Mach-E starts at $US43,895 (around $A60,000 before on-road costs).

By contrast the BMW iX, which was named WWCOTY best SUV, starts at a whopping $A135,900 while the Audi e-tron, which was dubbed WWCOTY best performance car, starts at $A137,700 – both enough for a small home loan deposit.

With the World Economic Forum noting on Friday that closing the wage gap between men and women still has a long way to go, including premium electric vehicles in the finalists list seems a bitter pill to say the least.

The criteria outlined by the awards is as follows: “The voting criteria are based on the same principles that guide any driver when buying a car. It is not “the woman’s car” because such a concept does not exist, but a car for everyone,” the WWCOTY awards say.

“Aspects such as safety, quality, price, design, ease of driving and environmental footprint among others are taken into account when voting.”

The announcement of the WWCOTY awards also follows hot on the heels of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that warns of dire, life-threatening consequences should the world not actively and very rapidly reduce carbon emissions.

With the IPCC report findings that the world is in serious danger of “cascading, compounding and aggregate impacts on cities, settlements, infrastructure, supply-chains and services due to wildfires, floods, droughts, heatwaves, storms and sea-level rise,” awarding the top title to a car that is not yet in all-electric production could be described as tardy at best.

In this light when looking at the awards criteria, it is difficult to marry up the intentions with the award outcomes.

Surely a planet that is safe for all to live on is paramount, and with transport-related emissions from burning fossil fuels contributing to a large proportion of climate change (in Australia it is nearly 20%), it would seem that zero-emissions options should be topping the list now, not in a few years time.

On a local note, living in an area – Northern NSW – that has just experienced its worst floods in recorded history, and that already has a very high proportion of women impacted by homelessness due to unprecedented rising house prices, which car is voted “the best” for women in their families is all too important to this writer.

Just as an example, in Coraki south of Lismore, women and children have been living in their cars awaiting rescue for days. In the Byron area, the numbers of women and their children in insecure housing is second only to Sydney, the largest state capital of Australia.

Frankly, the judge’s choices are more than tone-deaf in this female auto journalist’s opinion. Instead, it is a head-in-the-sand, blind, mute and gutless message to women, whose lives are especially in peril at the hands of unprecedented disasters brought on by climate change.