Prepare to be puzzled by the Car of the Year When it comes to cars, the wicked nymph Hubris, bent on revenge for misplaced pride, likes to use rust. Hubris has not left many cars unmolested, still fewer wholly intact, but if you are a diligent student of industrial decline, corporate folly and audaciously bad design, it may be worth searching out a rare 1979 Chrysler Horizon. In its yellow, guano-spattered rear glass you might find a peeling and craquelured sticker declaring it to be Car of the Year. But the Horizon brought even mediocrity into disrepute. What can it mean when such an undistinguished product is given such an incongruous distinction? Always known as CoTY, the European award for 2012"s "most outstanding" new car (from the previous 12 months) will soon be upon a bewildered public again. CoTY's ambitions are sound, aiming to recognise and reward "design, comfort, safety, economy" and so on, but all judging methodologies are corrupted by intellectual absurdities. Comfort, for example, is a psychological state and cannot be scientifically determined. And all judging panels are riven by prejudice, reputation-adjustment, personal jealousies and point-scoring. In the case of CoTY, might a heavy load of PR-funded fine-dining and hospitality arrangements also weigh a little too heavily on the delicate mechanisms of discrimination? This means that often errors of judgment remain. Sometimes, CoTY gets it half right. In 1968 the NSU Ro80 was a worthy recipient: this rotary-engined Wunder was the most astonishingly advanced (and beautiful) car ever conceived. It perhaps does not matter that it was tragically unreliable, as popular as a dead rat and contributed to a proud company's catastrophic demise. Other recent CoTY decisions have carried the aroma of either compromise or worthiness. The Volkswagen Polo is a boring, but admirable, commodity. The all-electric Nissan Leaf a bold, but misfired, experiment. Viewed historically, CoTY produces pantomime comedy in its parade of winners that turned out to be losers. Ridiculously, Austin has won the CoTY award as often as Mercedes-Benz. Ponder that the Citroën GS was a winner in 1971. For sure, here was a car with ingenious features... a special cause of excitement was the need to remove the entire engine when a spark plug needed changing. Or what about the Ford Scorpio of 1986? Certainly, this car was a brave experiment with popular taste: so challenging was its appearance that the French, not meaning to be kind, called it la grenouille triste. In many ways a fine thing, the Scorpio was such an Edsel that it discouraged European Ford from ever again trying to sell a large car. Consider this: the long since and mercifully dead-and-buried Rover has won two CoTYs. Renault has won the award many more times than Porsche. In fact, with six accolades, Renault is second only to Fiat, which has nine. In some ways that is fair because Renault has a fine tradition of innovation in design. But the statistic fails to acknowledge that very few people go to sleep at night dreaming "One day I will own a Mégane." Porsche retains those important bedtime fantasy properties. No doubt, Fiat and Renault have both from time to time produced cars of real genius. The 128, Panda and Uno come to mind: all CoTY winners. Then again, we think, if we can bear to, of the 1996 Fiat Brava and the 1982 Renault 9: two horrible designs which went straight from showroom to used-car lot without ever passing through the region of customer pleasure. Both Renault and Fiat are now in precarious commercial situations, beaten on price by Koreans, annihilated in terms of quality by the Germans. The problem with CoTY is the general problem with all design awards: there is often no connection between excellence as seen by the jury and the product's commercial viability. The Design Council had a similar problem: its list of early awards reads like industrial obituaries. Just to say Thomas Glover, Ecko Plastics or Milward electric shavers is to experience a profound melancholy. Who will win CoTY this year? From 35 candidates, a shortlist of seven will be announced tomorrow. We will know the winner on March 5. My vote would go to the Range-Rover Evoque or the Volkswagen Up! The first, an outstanding embrace of consumer psychology. The second, an austere but amusing design. If past experience is a pointer, the winner may be the Chevrolet Orlando, a car so ludicrously bad that even Clarkson couldn't make it funny. Meanwhile, as soon as they install charging points in my part of London (ETA: never), I will go to sleep dreaming about a Nissan Leaf.