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Every year, Kelley Blue Book released its Best Buy Awards, and 2021 is no exception. Their clever experts work hard to calculate the best cars to buy for any given year, looking for models that offer “the best blend of comfort, quality, dependability, low ownerships costs and affordability in a package that is easy and fun to drive.” This year, the Hyundai Motor Group (Kia, Genesis and Hyundai) took home top honors with six category winners — just edging out Toyota and Lexus, which had five.
Check out the full list of cars, trucks and SUVs here.
If you tried to distill down what the average new car buyer wants these days into a single vehicle, you might well end up with something very much like the Toyota RAV4. In fact, the RAV4 happened to be the best-selling vehicle that wasn’t a pickup truck in America last year; Toyota moved more than 448,000 of them off dealer lots from January 1st to December 31st.
The Hyundai Santa Fe received some major updates for 2021, including upgraded engines, hybrid and plug-in hybrid options and a range-topping Calligraphy trim.
Honda won’t let you get a manual on the Accord anymore. But you still get luxury car performance and refinement at a very affordable price point. There’s a reason the Accord has made the Car and Driver 10 Best list a stunning 36 times.
The RAV4 Prime is neither perfect nor refined. But it packs a 2.5-liter I-4 with a duo of electric motors to whip up a combined 302 hp, enough to spring it from 0 to 60 mph in 5.4 seconds in Car and Driver testing. It even proved quicker than the four-cylinder Supra in the 5-60 mph test, which is generally more equivalent to real-world conditions.
Small crossovers tend not to make great drivers’ cars, but the Kona EV is not the Nissan Leaf proxy many would expect. It offers 291 lb-ft of torque — comparable to a VW Golf R — and because it has an electric powerplant, that torque comes immediately at zero rpm.