DSCOTY 2010: Rules & Intro Options

[moe]

Dieselstation Car Of The Year is back! Once again it is time to reward the best new vehicles released for the new model year and admonish the crappy ones. We’re here to cover superminis to supercars, pickups to performance coupes, and everything in between.

The rules are pretty much the same as the last couple years. We're going to be voting on various categories...each category will be voted on for seven days until it closes, and then we will take the winner from each category and pit them together for an overall vote. Like last year, we will be splitting up the trucks and SUVs from the cars, so we will have a separate overall Dieselstation Car of the Year and Dieselstation SUV/Truck of the Year. The winners from each category will go into three overall votes and from there we will crown our Dieselstation Vehicles of the Year (Truck, Sports, and non-Sports). The categories are mainly for organizational purposes, so remember when it comes time to vote to not get too hung up on the title of the category and just vote for what you think is best!

To be eligible, a car must be either a new model or significantly updated for the 2010 model year. A few vehicles have been combined with their mechanical "twins" to reduce clutter. To simplify matters, just like in the past, the competition focuses only on models sold in the United States.

This year, there are 78 cars broken down into 17 categories and 30 trucks and SUVs in 7 categories. The categories are as follows:

Car of the Year

Subcompacts
Compacts
Family Sedans
Hybrid Family Sedans
Versatility
Boy Racers
Coupes
Convertibles
Compact Executive Sedans
Executive Sedans
Luxury Sedans
Performance Sedans
Performance
Sportscars
Open-top Exotics
Exotics
Ultra-Exotics

Truck of the Year

Compact SUVs
Compact Luxury SUVs
Family SUVs
Luxury SUVs
Performance SUVs
Hybrid SUVs
Pickups

As each category gets posted for voting, it will be linked from this thread. Like last year, there will be honorable mention polls wherein every car and truck that was close to the winning vehicle will get a chance to redeem itself (close = having received a number of votes equal to or greater than 75% of the winning vehicle in that category). Depending on how the voting pans out, there may be only one of these polls for all eligible vehicles (if there aren’t many close votes) or more than one (if there are).