The 50 best new cars of 2017: the top 5

In a handful of ways, the car shows room for improvement, which is why it has just made our top five rather than dominating it. But you can be sure that Aston Martin will have the time to make those improvements, what with the model lifespan of a typical DB car being about twice that of a 911. And so when Autocar does its ‘50 best cars of 2027’, don’t be surprised if this automotive blueblood is still in it. 

4. Volkswagen Golf R

What’s left to say about the R, a perennial fixture in this list and a repeat all-round contender for realworld money? This time around at least, broadly speaking, the car is new, Volkswagen having treated it to the same mild facelift as the rest of the Volkswagen Golf line-up. Truthfully, though, while this process tweaks the model’s appearance and infotainment and fractionally increases engine output, it remains very much as before. Which is to say brilliant on the kind of subtle and endlessly rewarding scale that most mainstream cars register on only fitfully – if at all.

Tellingly, it does not fade in recollection nor ever disappoint on re-acquaintance. The Golf R, like the Porsche 911 or Range Rover or Mazda MX-5, is discussed often in our office because it provides the kind of benchmark we all instinctively agree on. It is the kind of endless at-a-distance flattery that ought to damn the user to disappointment when finally returned to the sharp end. But instead, the same imperturbable embrace, brawny and substantive and spot on, rises to meet you every time. Naturally, a sizeable element of this is the Golf’s wider gift for ergonomic precision – although that hardly accounts for the EA888 engine’s brio or the neutral doggedness of the four-wheeldrive chassis or the unexpected compliance of the ride quality – all of which collude in the impression of a car in spectacular command of its dynamic faculties.

Consequently, its inclusion in the top five was never queried for a moment. In the court of public opinion, the Golf R remains Exhibit A in the case for both having your cake and eating it, and it would take only a slightly weightier onus on value for money for the car to stand triumphantly at the top of this short list every year. 

3. Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio

The most astounding thing about the Giulia Quadrifoglio is that it results from what could be called a standing start. Before the Giulia, Alfa Romeo hadn’t built a rear-drive saloon for decades. It hadn’t dabbled seriously in V8 engines, either – and its recent attempts at sportiness away from the 4C were limited to mostly awful, second-rate versions of the Mito and Alfa Romeo Giulietta. Its initial attempt at rivalling the mighty BMW M3 and Mercedes-AMG C63 ought by rights to have been an admirable failure at most, but it isn’t. It’s as far from that as you could hope to get. It is overachievement. It threatens to be a proper Alfa: fabulous, flawed and emotionally irresistible.

That it manages to be any of these things is rooted in the Giulia’s interminable development. Those repeated returns to the drawing board; the top-down refusal to compromise on key elements; the heavy-duty involvement of Ferrari engineers, each of them presumably immersed in Maranello’s bleedingedge approach to all things fast and feelsome. As palpably as a Porsche has passed through Weissach or a Renault through Dieppe or a Mercedes Affalterbach, so the Quadrifoglio feels a product of their input. The car’s steering, as ethereal as angel wings, is righteously incisive. Its weightless positivity is the counterpoint to the scrupulously severe German heft, and the Giulia’s lithe chassis has been primed to respond like a tuning fork, its direction changes resonating with the same immediate and emancipated vitality.

On Exmoor, limited to halfwaysane road speeds in spectacular weather, the Quadrifoglio doesn’t feel encumbered by the overt brawn of its back axle, either. In a single moment, it feels balanced, assured and animated all at once. Of course, in the same moment, it also seems insensitive to brake inputs, extremely thirsty, disappointing to the touch and very optimistically priced. Some of that is as familiar as it is unwelcome, but the Giulia’s extraordinary and unexpected talent is not. 

2. McLaren 570S

It doesn’t usually pay to work with adventurous car photographers, but this was one of the rare occasions when it did. Snapper Luc Lacey had picked a wiggle of tarmac he liked the look of for our road test shoot on the brand-new McLaren 570S. It was somewhere none of us had been before.

Typically, it was a road cut into the side of a Welsh mountain and, on the morning we were there, it was being buffeted by some awful conditions. I remember watching the clouds and rain blowing and swirling up the valley towards us and wondering at what point Halle Berry would appear in her X-Men get-up. I also remember thinking: “This isn’t exactly supercar weather.” Well, it depends on the supercar.

We explored the roads nearby before cracking on with the photos and discovered a narrow, rutted, potholed, partly unmarked B-road, bits of it mid-repair. It was the kind of road you might imagine would be every bit as incompatible with the enjoyment of a modern mid-engined McLaren as the weather was.

But no. What the 570S set about doing that morning was demonstrating exactly how usable it could be. How absorbent and forgiving its suspension could be when left in Normal mode. How the car’s incredibly precise, perfectly weighted, consistently paced and beautifully communicative steering allowed it to handle a tight mountain lane with a slippery surface (and a precipice just beyond the white paint) with the assured feel of a really great 1980s hot hatchback.

The car seemed to have all the grip and body control it needed – even with 562bhp to transmit onto wet tarmac through Pirelli P Zero Corsa tyres – and yet not a morsel of hypersensitivity or nervousness. Amazing. And I was in awe partly because, a day previously, I’d done timed performance runs of the same 570S for our road test and witnessed it do things that cars at double its price level might struggle to match.

It’s one thing to be able to deliver a mid-engined supercar with a carbonfibre tub for a price that many would lavish on a highly specialised sports car, but quite another to make it as broadly talented and as confidence-inspiring a supercar as the 570S is. I’d driven the P1 a couple of years earlier; I’ve driven the 570GT and McLaren 720S since; and I still think the 570S is probably a greater gift to the car-loving world than any of them. It feels like everything that’s brilliant about the way McLaren makes cars, reduced and distilled down to its most simple, affordable and appealing.

1. Porsche 911 GTS

Regardless of appearances, the Porsche 911 GTS has not won this contest to find our favourite car on sale. The GTS range can be thought of as a box of chocolates, full of different flavours, shapes and textures. A Porsche Targa here, a convertible there. A four-wheel-drive version lurking in the corner next to the PDK. You can pop as many in your mouth as you like but no combination will be as mouth-wateringly delicious as the simplest and best: this contest has been won by the base-spec GTS – the manual, rear-wheel-drive coupé on this page, and that alone.

For as long as the customer has had a selection of 911s to choose between (which is more than half a century now), less has almost always meant more. It is as if the moment you start to fiddle with the essential rightness of the original concept other than to add speed, some of that genius is lost and the car’s appeal is reduced.

The appeal of this GTS is the same as that of previous 911s to wear the badge, reborn on a new level of ability. But were it just a great driver’s car, it would have stood no chance of topping this list. As enthusiasts, we all want a car that will turn every great drive on a deserted country road into an unforgettable experience. But in our hearts, we also know that those drives constitute less than 1% of our time on the road; and if the car’s not working on the 99% of occasions when we’re not flinging it at the scenery, the role of the car in your life is reduced to that of a toy.