Toyota has just won 'Which Car' Best Manufacturer award for the first time.
Toyota won also 1st in the 'Which Car' Green award.
And the Prius has won 1st in its class in the JD POWER survey!
Finally Toyota came a close second in the 'Which Car' Reliability Award
'Which Car' Article In a year of some surprises, we name the car industry's winners and losers for 2007
This year, we've assessed 226 model ranges in eight different categories to see how the top makers have performed across the board. We've considered reliability, your views about the cars themselves - how much you love them or loath them - and about dealer sales and service. And we've added in our own expert appraisals - for road tests, safety and design innovation.
When the dust settled from all our testing and analysis, we selected the winners from the also-rans to present our awards for 2007.
BEST MANUFACTURER
For the first time, we've decided to honour the year's best manufacturer, taking into account innovation, test performance, safety, reliability and ownership.
Number 1 - Toyota
Toyota wins this most coveted of awards. It has cars in seven of our eight classes, three Best Buys and two Worth Considering models. Toyota is 'the' industry benchmark for build quality, consistently featuring in the reliability top-scorers. It was just squeezed into second place as this year's most reliable manufacturer, overall. One of the main reasons for choosing Toyota is that the company encourages innovation across the car industry. It leads the field in delivering hybrid technology and also drives safety standards, as the first to introduce driver knee-protection airbags. It now offers them as standard on the newly launched Auris medium hatchback - another first for this class.
On the road, Toyotas tend to be competent all-rounders - they aren't always the most involving to drive, but they tend to be comfortable and easy to use. None of its models shows any major weakness in our road tests. Finally, through Lexus, its luxury arm, Toyota has perfected the art of pleasing customers, with fine dealer service. But this isn't reserved forwealthy buyers, with Toyota's own dealers doing well in this respect, too. Perhaps this explains why almost eight in ten Toyota owners would recommend that their friends buy one.
demosale08.jpg)
