THE BAKKIE BAROMETER

We choose our Bakkie of the Year

It’s that time of the year again and as 2018 winds down off another frantic 12 months, Auto Bakkie Race! magazine as always has a vital duty to perform.

We must decide which of these bakkies released during the past twelve months is the best of all and by the end of all this, there will be just one – Best Bakkie 2019.

Best Bakkie has also become a pretty good bakkie market barometer over the years – the contest allows us to pick up on a vital and significant bakkie trends and over the fifteen years of the contest we have witnessed to onset of several crucial moves.

In the early years we noticed the advent of turbodiesel, the double-cab and 4x4s, then the charge of the China bakkies and more recently, it’s been downsizing as smaller-bore bakkies became all the rage. Now it appears that the bakkie world is moving upmarket, but how serious is the lunge of the luxury bakkie – is it as crucial as the aforementioned pickup fashions; or is this one a bakkie step too far? Read on to find out our thoughts on this latest and quite intriguing development.

Best Bakkie’s simple rules have not changed at all in the fifteen years of the competition – only bakkies been launched in the past 12 months since the last Best Bakkie are allowed, with only one model variant allowed per brand. From there we gathered all of those vehicles together, headed for the hills and evaluated each bakkie in the finest detail as recorded over the pages anon.

So, let’s see which of these seven 2019 finalists will emerge as our 15th Best Bakkie – place your bets, come back daily to catch up on each of the finalists, wave goodbye to the eliminated machines late next week and greet the winner Monday 12 November. Enjoy the ride - all the way to the finish!