HIGHLIGHTS
- The Premium Car Award by ICOTY 2021 was awarded to the Land Rover Defender.
- The BMW 2 Series Gran Coupe and the Mercedes GLE were the runner’s up.
- The first ever Green Car Award by ICOTY was won by the Tata Nexon EV.
Since its inception in 2005, the Indian Car of the Year (ICOTY) award is the most prestigious accolade sought by every car manufacturer in India. In 2021, a glittering ceremony attended by select stalwarts of the Indian automotive industry attended the 16th edition of the ICOTY awards held at the Andaz Hotel at the Aerocity in New Delhi. Held under strict social distancing and sanitization guidelines given the circumstances, the attendance was kept very exclusive. JK Tyre who has been a staunch partner to the ICOTY awards since their inception continued to support the award even this year. The ICOTY jury panel’s voting process was supported by Grant Thornton who came onboard as the Award Validators. The well-known music band from Nagaland, the Tetseo Sisters, regaled the audience with their neo-classic jazz and folk performances.
The Hyundai i20 was awarded the coveted ICOTY 2021 while the Royal Enfield Meteor 350 was awarded the IMOTY 2021. However there were two more awards to give out. The first is the Premium Car Award by ICOTY and for the first time a Green Car Award by ICOTY was introduced.
Land Rover took home the Premium Car Award by ICOTY 2021. However due to travel restrictions, representatives from the company could not be present at the event. We had pre-recorded messages from all the probable winners who could not attend the ceremony. Hence once the Defender was announced as the winner, the pre-recorded message from JLR was played and Rohit Suri, president and MD, JLR India virtually addressed the gathering. The Premium Car Award by ICOTY takes into consideration all premium and luxury that sit above the Rs 40 lakh mark. These include both locally produced as well as imported car models. The BMW 2 Series Gran Coupe with 61 points and the Mercedes-Benz GLE with 77 points were runner’s up in the category.
Every year there is a designated date on which the Jury assembles for a meet and tests out all the contenders together. However this year due to the Pandemic, this was not possible. The guidelines set by the ICOTY award also require that the vehicle be thoroughly tested by the appointed jury before the nomination cut-off date of November 30 and this date was extended by 10 days in the wake of the setback that the industry received during the pandemic. So every Jury member got a chance to test out the contenders individually this year.
This year’s awards judging was conducted through an online scoring and voting process curated and monitored by Grant Thornton Bharat and the points tally and winner were revealed by them only at the awards night.
The ICOTY scoring was done by an experienced panel of jury members comprising of Yogendra Pratap (Auto Today), Rahul Ghosh (Auto Today), Dhruv Behl (Auto X), Ishan Raghava (Auto X), Aspi Bhathena (Car India), Sarmad Kadri (Car India), Sirish Chandran (Evo India), Aniruddha Rangnekar (Evo India), Pablo Chaterji (Motoring World), Kartik Ware (Motoring World), Bertrand D’souza (Overdrive), Bob Rupani (Overdrive), Muralidhar Swaminathan (The Hindu Business Line), Vikrant Singh (Carwale), Kushan Mitra (The Pioneer), Girish Karkera (Times Auto) and Kranti Sambhav (Times Drive).
Article Credit: Rahul Ghosh
Full Article: https://www.indiatoday.in/auto/auto-news/story/land-rover-defender-wins-the-premium-car-award-by-icoty-2021-from-the-event-1777941-2021-03-11
