2016 10 Best Cars

10Best involves more than drawing up lists of our sub-$80,000 favorites. Every year we enter our weeklong evalu­ation looking for new and improved combinations of virtues: value and engagement, performance and poise, sights and sounds, soul and character. The cars that earn this award do more than merely succeed on one or two criteria; they come to us fully formed, polished, complete. But how do they get that way? This year we delve deeper into our winners’ makings to better explain why they won. Who builds and develops these cars? Where? How do they go about it? What is a 10Bester truly made of? There are, of course, varied answers because cars are not simple things. You do not buy them on Etsy, and we’re not running a Maker Faire here. Automobiles are still the most complex and technologically advanced consumer products that man has ever devised. What follows in this section is our proof.\

THE WINNERS: