Car of the Year Awards 2025: Overall winner
Being named overall What Car? Car of the Year is the highest honour a new model can receive...
Renault 5 52kWh Techno
The new Hyundai Santa Fe, Kia EV3 and MG HS have all raised the bar in their respective classes in the past 12 months, as have the Skoda Elroq and Volkswagen Passat.
In a different year, any one of them would have made a deserving overall winner, but in 2025 they’ve had the misfortune of coming up against the new Renault 5 (R5).
When you drive the R5 and see the attention it gets, you realise there’s so much affection for its design that Renault could have penny-pinched on the engineering and still sold as many as it could make. But instead, it has clearly thrown everything at the car, with this resulting in something that offers a competitive real-world range and strikes a superb balance between comfort and driving fun.
It also has an infotainment system that shames those in some far more expensive machines, both in terms of functionality and usability. And even though we don’t award marks for style (after all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder), the huge demand for the R5 brings further tangible benefits in the form of rock-solid predicted resale values and highly tempting PCP finance rates.
This is a car that you can buy with your head and your heart, then – one that shows you don’t have to spend a fortune to get a great electric car.
In short, the R5 moves the game on more than any other model launched in the past 12 months, so it has to be our Car of the Year.
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