If you’re in the market for a new car, it’s easy to drown in a sea of choice. With the curtain set to fall on another fiscal year, the automotive industry is bending over backwards to sell cars off the back of the tax benefits on offer to the many who are motivated to buy before June 30. This is a good time to buy if you are lucky enough to be able to claim depreciation against taxable income, for example, or for employers keen to upgrade fleets for similar reasons.

The only problem with being in the money is: Which car? The Australian car market offers unbelievable choice – it’s like going into Bing Lee for a TV. Terrifying. There are 42 different ones on offer, all superficially suitable, and – without inside info, or a great deal of spare time – narrowing that down to precisely the right one for you can be a complete nightmare. So it is with cars.

How much money you can spend puts a ceiling on your automotive aspirations, pretty much ruling out that Aston Martin DB9. Again. After that, personal preference and lifestyle factors – not having kids, say, or finally getting rid of the kids and indulging in a nice, healthy mid-life crisis (think Merc SLK55 AMG) – allow you to slot your available funds into a particular vehicle category.

When you get to that point in the journey (the short list, not the mid-life crisis) the narrowing-down process starts. You’re staring at 42 TVs, with wheels and an engine. Do you buy the vehicle you really want, or the one your accountant would prefer? What are the hidden ownership costs, such as depreciation and fuel, which might just whip much of the gloss off the ownership experience? Which car on your short list is a winner over time?

These are the questions Gold Star Cars attempts to answer. We’ve taken the crème de la crème of the sub-$150K cars – 98 of them in total; all cars worth owning within their price ranges – specified the best model variant in that line-up, and divided them up by segment and price. Then we drove Microsoft Excel like we stole it, and tallied up those that represent the top three financial propositions over 18 very different classes of car.



SELECTION
Best news? None of the choices are dud drives. In our view, there’s no good deal to be had if the car is a dog from the outset, or even substantially behind the competition dynamically. To make it to our shortlist and be in the running for a place in Gold Star Cars, the cars already have to be worth owning within their competitive set, as judged by Wheels’ experienced road testers.

SCORING
Within each class of car, the winner of each test category (say, insurance cost) gets the maximum points allotted to that category. Every other car gets a score proportional to their proximity to the winner. So, rather than allocating (say) 10 points for a win, nine for second, eight for third, etc., the points are representative of the cars’ performances relative to the winning score – a fairer way to play.

CROSS-CLASS COMPARISONS
Scores can’t really be compared across the categories. In other words 90 percent in the Hot Hatch class isn’t necessarily the same thing as 90 percent in Sports Coupes. This is particularly true of warranty, service interval, and all the dollar value-based categories. Drive score isn’t comparable outside the class boundaries either – four out of five for People Movers isn’t the same drive as four out of five among Sports Sedans, obviously. Safety score is directly comparable across the classes, however, as those criteria don’t change.

CLASS CEILING
As in previous Gold Star Cars, the purchase price is capped at $150,000. Above $150,000, it’s felt the relevance of the finances taper off, and the relevance to buyers is even less. Only an elite few purchase cars above that price, and the impact of value and hidden costs – cost of fuel, servicing and insurance, and even depreciation, for example – is diminished.



THE GOLD STAR ENGINE ROOM
Purchase Price
Price is scored out of only five, because most people go into the car-buying deal well aware of the retail price. The other reason is that some classes span a large price range and giving too great an emphasis on retail price alone would disadvantage the more expensive cars in-class, diminishing in turn the impact of equally relevant costs, such as depreciation.

Insurance
Ten points are devoted to insurance, the quotes for which were supplied by AAMI, based on a 35-year-old male living in Chatswood (2067) NSW, Rating 1 For Life, no finance and private use. Recommended retail price was used as the basis
for the agreed value.

Fuel
Fifteen points are awarded to annual fuel cost, which is a combination of ADR 81 combined fuel consumption and the cost of the fuel recommended by the manufacturer. We used Ausstats’ average Australian 14,600 annual vehicle kilometres from the Survey of Motor Vehicle Use 2006 for the calculation, and the following Sydney pump prices: 91 RON ULP at $1.56.3, 95 RON PULP at $1.62.9, 98 RON PULP at $1.68.9 and diesel at $1.82.9 (all in dollars per litre). Fuel grade was the minimum RON specified by the manufacturer.

Warranty
Vehicles could earn up to 12 points for warranty. Duration is more relevant than distance for most buyers, so 10 points were awarded to the vehicle in each class with the longest-duration warranty. A further two bonus points were awarded for unlimited kilometres.

Service
Eight points are awarded to minor service interval. Firstly, there’s the cost, and secondly, there’s the inconvenience of visiting the dealership more frequently than you might with an alternative vehicle.



Safety
To tick all the boxes and score the maximum 15 points on offer, vehicles have to benefit from the most relevant passive and active safety technology. ABS is more or less a given these days – two points. Electronic brakeforce distribution (EBD), which forces the rear brakes to contribute fully to the stopping process adds one point, while emergency brake assist (EBA), which ramps up the line pressure to peak levels even if the driver doesn’t press hard enough on the brake, adds two more points. ESP, with all its crash-avoidance benefits, adds five points, and side and/or curtain airbag protection adds five more.

Drive
This is the one subjective score of all the categories, worth five points. Remember, no cars got onto the Gold Stars grid without already being relatively good drives. The purpose of ranking relative to one another is simple: all other things being equal, the car that’s the best drive is the one you’d buy, right?

Correction
In the Wheels July issue’s Gold Star Cars feature, we incorrectly awarded Mitsubishi’s Outlander VRX as the best-value compact SUV. The award should have gone to the Subaru Forester XS. A data entry mistake meant that the Subaru was not awarded the correct points for its 3year/unlimited kilometre warranty. With the full points awarded, the Forester leap frogs from third to first place in its class.