The fastest cars at Wheels Car of the Year 2022

COTY day one. While the judges pored over each car, familiarising, discussing, prodding trim and looking in engine bays, there was something perhaps a little more stimulating to watch happening a couple of kilometres away.

A black Mercedes-Benz S450L waits on a long, empty strip of tarmac, before its rear tyres chirp, its rear squats, and the limo from Stuttgart makes its way north of 120km/h before the anchors drop, and its ABS sees it standing still again in a matter of seconds.

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Data collection for Car of the Year is equal parts fun, frantic, and daunting. Louis Cordony and I found ourselves in charge of data for COTY 2022, while the rest of our support team helped photographers and video team keep cars clean for capture.

Braking, cabin noise, weights, and as you’ll read below, acceleration were the primary metrics we focused on, though we even checked the actual speed at an indicated 100km/h for the field.

But what made it to 100k/h first, you ask? It might not surprise you to find it’s the…

Porsche Taycan 4S Cross Turismo – 4.2s to 100km/h

The electric wagon makes it to within a tenth of its claimed 0-100km/h time, 4.1s, and to make sure we went back and launched the Taycan to 100 four more times. Each time, it returned the exact same 4.2s.

When you spend $250,000 (as tested), you’d want to know that 420kW and 650Nm is actually working for you.

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It says something about the ease with which EVs can be driven that consistent acceleration was rampant in the electric contenders in the COTY field, but the Taycan showed it best. Each run it hit every 10km/h marker within the same tenth. To 120? 5.7 seconds.

Kia EV6 GT-Line AWD – 5.09s

That’s right, the car that takes home the trophy isn’t the quickest, but it is pretty bloody quick. While it’s almost a second slower than the Porsche, the long-range version’s near-5sec sprint to 100km/h is still sports car territory. Our testing beat its claimed 5.2s time.

Its 239kW and 605Nm are both impressive, though the torque and how immediate it is are the reasons we see the EV6 here, as with many high-energy EVs.

Hyundai Ioniq 5 – 5.29s

A little slower, and only a little behind the EV6 in our overall ranking, the Ioniq 5 is, in a lot of ways almost as good as its Kia cousin. But two tenths, to most humans, isn’t really noticeable in a day-to-day, and we can’t imagine there are many who will be noticing the difference.

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If you look at the EV6’s outputs, the Ioniq is only a little bit down on power, 225kW vs 239kW, and matches the EV6’s torque.

After the podium, we find the hefty-but-plush S-Class and the mid-sized SUV from Genesis, the GV70, only a tenth apart from each other, both weighing in at over two tonnes, both powered by turbo V6s, and both with all-wheel drive. Despite the body shapes, sometimes similar ingredients get similar results.

Down the back of the pack, we find no surprises in the cars that aren’t really meant to go fast. The Outback and Palisade, 9.4 and 9.3 seconds to 100km/h respectively, are built to be comfortable on long trips with a few people inside, and the MX-30, 9.2s, while an EV, is a relatively low-range, low-powered (107kW/271Nm) city SUV and doesn’t quite have the highway punch of those from South Korea.

Below is the full table, with 0-100km/h and 0-120km/h times, ranked by their time to 100, with a column to rank their times to 120.