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The Vauxhall insignia has won the European Car of the Year award for 2009, beating the heavily favoured Ford Fiesta by a solitary point.

The competition, which brings together votes from 59 motoring journalists in 23 European countries, gave the decision to GM’s new family car by 321 points, to 320 for the Fiesta. The VW Golf, third of contest’s seven finalists polled 223 points.

The result was revealed this morning to Carl-Peter Forster, president of GM Europe, by Autocar editor-...Read the full article

 

Finally a worthy winner!!!

Congratulations Vauxhall and GM.

Congratulations to Vauxhall; nice to see the COTY award go to a good car rather than the oddball choice of so many previous winners. Interesting to see if GM is still around for next year's award................ Personally, sorry to see that the Fiesta did not win as I think this would have sent a good message to the general public about encouraging us all to consider smaller more economical cars in future.

Hold on there fellas. 'Congrats to Vauxhall'!?

- This car was wholly designed, engineered and developed by Opel staff in Germany, specifically the engineers and designers at the International Technical Development Centre(ITEZ, German abbreviated title), amongst the 18,300 persons employed by Adam Opel GmbH at the Rüsselsheim complex.

Let's not get carried away with 'Vauxhall' being anything other than a marketing brand for GM Europe(Opel) cars in Great Britain. Yes there is an engineering capacity in UK under the GM Europe/Vauxhall banner but it is for commercial vans only, at IBC Vehicles Luton.

Herzlichen Glückwunsch to Opel and its excellent engineers! Here's to you surviving the death of GM.

Good point and (mostly) correct. But GM's design boss is Mark Adams and he comes from the UK - lots of his team are Brits too. There was also a huge amount of chassis tuning work done in the UK, centred on Millbrook, GM's UK proving ground.

At least Vauxhall build cars in UK unlike Ford!

Am I alone in being fed up with the current "Ford can do no wrong" attitude in magazine?

Its getting like the "BMW can do no wrong" editorial attitude from a few years ago

Referring to the comments about Opel - is there another Country in the world as unpatriotic as this one...?

Douglas Jardine:

Am I alone in being fed up with the current "Ford can do no wrong" attitude in magazine?

Here here. Ford stopped making good cars when they stopped making the Sierra and, to a lesser extent, the Scorpio.

Douglas Jardine:

At least Vauxhall build cars in UK unlike Ford!

Am I alone in being fed up with the current "Ford can do no wrong" attitude in magazine?

Its getting like the "BMW can do no wrong" editorial attitude from a few years ago

 No you are not alone, I feel exactly the same!!!  I am fed of of the Focus being "the class leader" for example, when anyone with any sense wouldn't put their own private money into buying a new one.  OK, dynamically they are good, but they (Fords as a whole) are not as well built as many competitors.  I recall being a passenger sat in the back of a Focus recently - the quality of plastics on the back doors for example was awful! So cheap and hard, yet no mention of this seems to be made in road tests etc.  There is definitely some sort of bias going on it would seem.  They make good rentals,  but I would not put my own money into buying one...

Congratulations to GM. Commiserations to Ford

 But does the VW really deserve third place? Every review I read on the Golf said it was good but contained little progress over the last model so I superised to see it getting awarded so many points.

I am quite happy that the road testers pay more attention to matters other than the quality of the rear seat plastics.

 It is the obsesion with perecived quality over more fundamental aspects of vehicle design that is stopping cars being as economical as practical and contributes to the dull handling of many.

 My secondhand VW Passat cost me far more to run in terms of parts and labour than my more recent secondhand Ford Mondeos. As a new car purchase it is just about possible to make a case for VW on retained value but once the guarantee has expired that value for money argument no longer stacks up.

 

 

You raise a question that I often wonder about.  Do road testers ever sit in the back seats?  You get a very different impression of a car.