On October, 22th during the business brunch at Moscow Beer & Brut gastronomic bar the steering committee of National Award of Automotive Business Expert TOP-5 AUTOannounced the start of the fourth season (2015 – 2016) of contest. The event was attended by members of jury, info partners, representatives of such companies as: BMW, General Motors, Citroen, Chery Motors, Haval Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Jaguar Land Rover, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Renault, Subaru, Suzuki, Toyota, Volkswagen, Volvo, Zotye, GAZ Group.
The participants discussed the long-list of entrants submitted by the steering committee. This year the long –list comprises 85 brand new or substantially renewed models during 2015. It is significantly less than in previous years, which reflects the ongoing recession in industry and departure of some of the players from Russian market. At the same time “the turn of the market to the East” becomes more and more visible. In current long-list there are eleven new models from five Chinese brands versus six cars from three brands only three years ago. The list of main nominations underwent slight revisions and looks like this: Compact City Car; Large and Executive City Car; Compact Crossover / Offroader and SUV; Large Crossover / Offroader; Sports Car / Coupe / Roadster / Cabrio.
The list of special nominations includes the following categories: Light Commercial Vehicles / Pick-up, Auto-Person of the Year, PR-department of a Car Manufacturer.
As usual after the long-list is finally confirmed all members of jury will be distributed special assessment tables with all entrants. The selection of nominees will be carried over until February next year. The experts are to evaluate vehicles using five main criteria: price – quality ratio, styling, technical innovations, comfort and usability. Five entrants in each category with best results would become nominees of TOP-5 AUTO 2016. Nominees in special category Auto-Person of the Year will be detected on basis of data from media monitoring conducted on more than 300 federal and regional media-outlets by TNS Russsia Research Company.
After summing-up the qualification round in the first half of February 2016 the steering committee will announce the short-list of nominees. The next awarding ceremony TOP-5 AUTO will take place in May 2016. Tabulation and certification of votes will be carried out by the international auditing and consulting company KPMG.
