For the first time in the 26-year history of the South African Car of the Year (SACOTY) awards, not one, but two winners were announced. The BMW 530d and Volkswagen Polo 1.6 TDI share the title for 2011, but the result has sparked heated debate, with questions surrounding the efficacy of the judging process. In response, Danie van Jaarsveld, Chairman of the SA Guild of Motoring Journalists (SAGMJ) has issued the following statement to clarify and reiterate the decision in electing this year’s winners.

The 2011 WesBank/SAGMJ Car of the Year competition produced two winners, the Volkswagen Polo and the BMW 530d. When the announcement was made, one could hear a pin drop and the uncomfortable silence lasted unbearably long. It was not a universally or immediately popular outcome and a great deal has been said on the controversy, some of it being very critical. In view of the importance of COTY to both the Guild and its sponsors, I take full responsibility for this decision and would like to share with you the thinking that led to this outcome.

A great deal has been made of how we, the Guild, would embrace accountability and transparency not only in all our processes, but also very specifically in COTY which has seen its credibility coming under increasing scrutiny.

To this end and after a great deal of thought, we designed a process that, to the best of our knowledge, would yield a respected winner, give every new model a realistic and deserving chance of performing in the competition and to obtain the buy-in of the public at large – something which has been sorely lacking.

While I won’t regurgitate the entire process now, it suffices to say that, in the end, 23 jury members applied 575 votes over the 10 finalists. My mathematical skills do not extend to calculating the probability of a tie, but intuitively it would appear to be remote. As things turned out, two vehicles produced the only tie in the scores at the top of the leader board.

Once faced with this situation, we had several options:

• I could ask a confidant in the jury to alter one of his or her scores by a single point. Doing so would make a farce of all the openness, accountability and trustworthiness that we aspire to achieve.
• We could attempt to determine a winner through an acceptable second interpretation of the scores, much like the driver with the most wins would win the Formula One world Championship if there was a tie at the top of the log. On a count-out the Polo and the BMW, both had one 10 pointer, the Polo had a 9 and and an 8 pointer, while the BMW had two 8 pointers. If this was the basis for determining the winner, the Polo would have won. Another legitimate reinterpretation of the results would have been to see which car attracted votes from the highest number of jurors. The BMW got votes from 16 jurors while the Polo had the support of 15 jurors. It was therefore clear that we could not reinterpret the scores without facing a legitimate challenge from the losing party.

The rules of the competition makes no provision for the resolving a tie and any re-vote or other additional measure would simply have fallen outside the rules of the competition and was, therefore, not an option. The fact that a full voting grid with the exact scores of each juror, allocated to each model would be available for public scrutiny meant that whatever we did had to pass the test of fair play and scrupulous adherence to the rules.

The rules of the competition do however, contain two clauses that now, under these circumstances, were contradictory. There is a rule that says, “there shall only be one winner” and another that says “the winner is the car with the highest score” and we now found ourselves in the untenable situation where we were in breach of at least one of the rules of the competition, regardless of what we decided to do.

The only course of action open to us that did not require the deliberate breach of the rules of the competition through a specific action, was to accept that there was two vehicles that met the “the winner is the car with the highest score” criteria and this is what we decided to do.

It was not a cop out. It was an unpopular, brave and a difficult decision, one that we knew would complicate the crowning achievement of our efforts over the last eighteen months and give our critics and detractors ample ammunition. Ultimately however, it was the only right thing to do.

What can we take from this event ?

• The only fair criticism that I do not have an adequate response to, is that we should have foreseen this eventuality and should have had a rule to solve the problem. It is an extremely unlikely outcome, but yes, we did not cater for it in our rules. We now need to agree upon and implement a procedure that will allow us to resolve such a tie if it should ever happen again.
• The credibility of our new process passed an unforeseen, unfortunate and difficult test to the credit of the competition and the Guild as a whole. Authoritative representatives of both the winning manufacturers volunteered to me last night that while they would have preferred to be the sole winner, their faith in the competition has been restored and that they were happy with and supportive of our decision making. A number of other respected industry leaders further congratulated us on taking such a principled stand, putting the integrity of the competition ahead of expedience.
• It says a lot for the new format that the BMW and the Polo could both be winners, underpinning the fairness of the contest and clearly demonstrating that there are no artificial or undocumented impediments to the performance of any finalist.

I apologise to each and every Guild member for the controversy and discomfort that this decision may have caused, but remain steadfast in my belief that the fact that we can be trusted to be accountable for our actions and to face the outcomes of our processes without manipulation, is in the long run, in the best interests of the Guild and all of its members.”

So there you have it, a tie for 2011 Car of the Year and in our opinion, having driven both the BMW 530d and VW Polo 1.6 TDI, not unjustified under the circumstances. What do you think about the result and the reason behind it?

For detailed scoring of each COTY finalist and the judges comments, click here.

The 2011 South African Car of the Year (SACOTY) was announced last night at a WesBank sponsored gala banquet, attended by the who’s who of the South African motoring industry, at Gallagher Convention Centre, Johannesburg.

For the first time, this year’s competition was conducted using a the more modern and completely transparent European Car of the Year (COTY) based scoring system and, for the first time in the 26-year history of the SACOTY awards, produced a tie for first place. Ladies and gentleman, the winner of the 2011 SA Car of the Year title is, the BMW 530d and the Volkswagen Polo 1.6 TDI, with both contenders having scored the exact same number of points to share the top spot this year.

The adoption of the European scoring system meant that South African Guild of Motoring Journalists (SAGMJ) Jury members were given 25 points in total to allocate to no more than five of the finalists and no less than three, as is done in Europe. With all the scores and the judge’s comments being open for scrutiny from the moment the winners were announced and with no more than ten points at a time being allowed to be allocated to any one vehicle by a judge, it was always going to be a close race, which the final audited scores reflect.

The COTY finalists are put through their paces at the world renowned Gerotek vehicle test facility outside Pretoria before voting takes place. The WesBank / SAGMJ COTY competition is about automotive excellence and the winning vehicle must score highly in its own class, not against each other as is often thought, but across a variety of categories including those that reflect value for money, safety, dynamics, technology and aesthetics to name a few.

Although separated by more than R400 000 in sticker price, the BMW 530d and Volkswagen Polo 1.6 TDI were decidedly well ahead of their peers in their relevant classes and ultimately could not be separated by a single point at the end of a long and thorough process.

The final results of the 2011 SACOTY are as follows: