The most popular motoring articles of 2019
Your fave five
HUNDREDS of thousands of you come to Driving.co.uk every month for motoring news, features, reviews, advice and a lot more besides. Some of our pages have timeless appeal — the ‘What is AdBlue?‘ page, for example, racked up scores of visits throughout 2019, despite being published two years earlier.
But what articles published last year hit the mark with readers, we hear you ask*. Here’s a list of the top five most-read pages published during the last 12 months. If you publish a rival website: you’re welcome for the info.
1 Jeremy Clarkson reviews
The Sunday Times’s chief car reviewer and columnist appears so many times in the top 50 most popular pages that we’ve lumped all things Clarkson-related into one entry here, to allow a few other articles to get a look in.
You really do love Mr C and his irreverent write-ups — some say nobody does it better. Driving.co.uk’s other road testers couldn’t possibly comment.
But there’s a twist: since 2018, Driving.co.uk hasn’t published Clarkson reviews verbatim — for those, you need to buy the newspaper or become a Sunday Times digital subscriber. But we do still let you know his main arguments for and against each model reviewed, and clearly you like our round-ups.
These were the five most popular Clarkson pages this year, in descending order:
– The Ford Ranger Raptor is for townies, but I’m sold on pick-ups
– The Mercedes S Class plug-in hybrid is like a private jet with number plates
– The Ford Focus Active Estate is the best family hatch no one will buy
– The Audi R8 is exactly what a supercar should be … and I still wouldn’t buy one
– The new Suzuki Jimny is perfect for life under Jeremy Corbyn
2 The UK’s top 10 best-selling cars
For the last 12 months we’ve been updating a “live” page showing the best-selling cars of 2019 (the latest figures for December have just been published by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders). It’s clearly a useful guide as throughout the year readers have flocked to it to find out which models are the nations favourites. And why not? All those Ford Fiesta and VW Golf buyers can’t be wrong. Click here.
3 Guy Martin’s Great Escape
Towards the end of the year, The Sunday Times Driving editor Nick Rufford gained behind-the-scenes access to daredevil Guy Martin ahead of his attempt to jump the double barbed wire fence that foiled Steve McQueen’s character in 1963 classic movie The Great Escape.
Martin’s jump was filmed by Channel 4 for a TV show that aired in December (at the time of writing you can still catch Guy Martin’s Great Escape on All4), though our own video includes an exclusive interview with the star, so click here to find out how the Lincs resident was feeling ahead of his risky stunt.
4 The lowdown on the new Audi RS 6
This was a surprise: the most read-about car on Driving.co.uk last year, besides our reviews, was the Audi RS 6. You obviously love posh estate cars with supercar-like performance. Noted.
5 Long-distance electric cars
The idea that car buyers will settle for electric cars that travel less than 200 miles between charges is very much kicked into the long grass with the knowledge that one of our best-performing pages of last year was a guide to 10 electric cars — already on sale or coming soon — that have a range of more than 248 miles. It also suggests buyers really are beginning to have their heads turned by plug-in vehicles.
Since we published the article, a few more contenders have been announced, so expect further updates to the page this year.
* It could have been the voices in my head, now I think about it — Ed.
