The U.S. News 2020 Best Cars for the Money awards winners list includes models from only five automakers—and only one was a U.S. marque

What are the best cars for the money? A question like that can be loaded and subjective. But one organization that tries to put some data and methodology into answering it is U.S. News & World Report, a media enterprise that has made quite a business for themselves out of rankings in a variety of domains including education, health, money, travel, cars, and civics.

On January 23, U.S. News publicly released their take on the 2020 model year’s automotive crop, honoring winners of the 2020 Best Cars for the Money awards in an event at the 2020 Washington Auto Show in Washington, D.C.

According to U.S. News, there are many considerations beyond price alone that should factor into a consumer’s assessment of value when considering an automotive purchase.

“Cars with low price tags aren’t always good values,” said Jamie Page Deaton, executive editor of U.S. News Best Cars. “A cheap car can have high ownership costs, making it more expensive in the long run. Plus, a lot of inexpensive cars don’t give you a great ownership experience; it’s not a good deal if it’s not a good car. Every Best Car for the Money winner is a pleasure to own and a good value overall.”

In their approach to deriving rankings, U.S. News divides automakers’ current car, SUV and minivan offerings into 11 categories, evaluating them on criteria that include:

• Existing quality scores from a previously released set of U.S. News Best Car Rankings for 2020
• Safety and reliability data
• Measurements of what U.S. News terms “the collective opinion of the automotive press,” aggregating opinions of journalists on the performance and interior of each vehicle, as well as the overall strength of reviewer recommendations
• Market price, which U.S. News says it measured using “real-time transaction” data provided by TrueCar
• Five-year cost total cost of ownership data provided by Vincentric, an automotive data compilation and analysis firm

A few elements of the results are immediately striking: only five automakers were represented among the winners, and only one of those was a U.S. automaker. In terms of the number of winners across the categories, Kia topped the list with five of their models winning Best Cars for the Money awards, followed by Toyota with three, Honda with two, and Chevrolet and Hyundai with one each.

The strong presence of Kia on this list is unsurprising. Hyundai and Kia, although it’s probably not quite accurate to describe them as “sister companies,” are certainly related companies. Given that relationship, it’s hard to get your head around just what the strategic thinking is behind the environment of “friendly ‘coopetition’ that seems to have evolved among these two Korean automakers.

But whatever the strategy, in just about every segment except the hot hatch, where the Hyundai Veloster is the car critic’s darling du jour, Kia is succeeding in offering up a take that feels younger, fresher, and more vibrant.

Arguably even more noteworthy, however, was the presence among the winners of the 2020 Chevrolet Impala, given that, according to GM Authority, 2020 is the last year that the model will be produced.   

There’s quite a note of irony there. The one segment in which a U.S. automaker managed to make a ranking with selection criteria intended to measure how well automakers have done at optimizing quality and value is a segment that U.S. automakers have all but exited: larger sedans.

Yet in the segments in which U.S. automakers, supposedly driven by market preference, are going “all in”—SUVs and crossovers—U.S. automakers failed to earn a single slot in this ranking.

It’s difficult to not want to connect the dots here and infer that this is still more evidence that, as we have previously argued, recent decisions of U.S. automakers to discontinue most of their sedans and coupes may have been misguided at best or, even worse, based on cynical efforts to limit consumer choice to categories that tend to squeeze more profit out per unit.

On the flip side, look at the passenger cars that did make the 2020 U.S. News Best Cars for the Money list. One of them is the Honda Fit. This hatchback has earned high praise among automotive critics as a good small car that, through clever space utilization, feels surprisingly roomy inside. But even more noteworthy is that the Honda Fit also earns high praise among enthusiasts for offering a refreshingly fun and engaging experience.

Of course, it’s well known that critics lavished similar praise on certain other domestic models like Ford’s Fiesta ST and Focus ST.

Yet these models have also been discontinued in the U.S. market.

Go figure.

Domestic automakers can go ahead and say that they’re just building what the U.S. market wants, but that claim can easily have the ring of a lazy excuse from companies that have somehow evolved cultures that—of course with some laudable exceptions—aren’t building product that’s all that successful in capturing the U.S. market’s imagination.

Meanwhile, here’s the full U.S. News 2020 Best Cars for the Money list, by category:

• Two-Row SUV: 2020 Hyundai Santa Fe
• Three-Row SUV: 2020 Kia Sorento
• Compact Car: 2020 Kia Forte
• Compact SUV: 2020 Honda CR-V
• Hybrid and Electric Car: 2020 Toyota Corolla Hybrid
• Hybrid and Electric SUV: 2020 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid
• Large Car: 2020 Chevrolet Impala
• Midsize Car: 2020 Toyota Camry
• Minivan: 2020 Kia Sedona
• Subcompact Car: 2020 Honda Fit
• Subcompact SUV: 2020 Kia Soul

Further details on the list are available at the official 2020 Best Cars for the Money page from U.S. News, which also lists the finalists that didn’t make the ultimate cut. For example, the Chrysler 300 was one of three finalists in the Large Car category that the Chevrolet Impala ended up taking.

That said, how many U.S. large cars remain on the market that could have been finalists?

Yup. It’s a pretty short list.