AutoGuide 2014 Utility Vehicle of the Year Award

It’s been a big year for crossovers and SUVs

Last year AutoGuide crowned the Scion FR-S with our inaugural Car of the Year award. In the coming weeks we will be announcing our 2014 Car of the Year winner, but in the meantime it is time to introduce a new award; the AutoGuide.com Utility Vehicle of the Year.

With utility vehicles starting to outpace sedans as the most popular models on the road, we’ve seen a lot of really great ones debut over the past year. This new award encompasses all high riding five door vehicles from the Buick Encore to the Infiniti QX80. That means there are a lot of contenders and we have spent countless hours evaluating dozens of entries over the past twelve months to whittle the field down to three finalists.

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CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR

Before we get to the finalists, we would like to give a few honorable mentions to vehicles like our long term tester the Mazda CX-5, plus this year saw the launch of the new Toyota RAV4. Both are solid new compact crossover offerings, but neither made it as a finalist.

Next, an honorable mention has to goes to the Swiss Army Knife of SUVs; the Range Rover Sport. We love this SUV and there may be no other vehicle on the market that can match its on-road agility as well as its off-road prowess. But starting at over 60k, and escalating rapidly from there, it’s not really relevant to the vast majority of folks.