The 10 best vehicles Ars Technica drove in 2025

Of all the cars we've driven and reviewed this year, these are our picks.

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[astack]

Very nice list! I have owned prior year models of two cars on it: a 2024 Ioniq 5 which replaced a 2010 Honda Civic Hybrid.

The Honda Civic hybrid was an amazing car that got 47 mpg on average when it was new, and about 41 mpg at 150k miles. I had almost no trouble with it, and did most of the maintenance myself. Definitely would buy another one.

The Ioniq 5 is a mixed bag. The EV parts of it are wonderful (fast charging!!!), but the software and minor features are a little mystifying. Besides the lack of a rear wiper, it has a wireless charging pad and Apple CarPlay, but not wireless CarPlay. So the wireless charging pad basically went unused until I installed an aftermarket wifi CarPlay dongle. The frustrating part is that the car already has a wifi antenna, but it only works with verizon cell service. Why?? Similarly, I just ordered an aftermarket chip that locks the doors to the car if you walk away with it unlocked. The car is fully capable of locking the doors itself and will do so if the auto unlock is triggered but no door is opened, but walk away auto-lock wasn't included as an option on N. American models. Mystifying. It's like they shipped a car that they hadn't quite finished working on. It seems like they finally got around to fixing these issues for the 2025 Ioniq 5 though.

 

[astack]

Glad it's not just me wondering about the software issues on the Ioniq.

The fact that it doesn't have auto-locking doors is baffling (a feature I'm pretty sure I saw on a Ford Taurus 20 years ago).

When I'm in parking lots and I see other Ioniqs, I always check to see if the door handles are popped out (which means it's unlocked) -- they usually always are.

Lol, I'm going to have to start doing checking other ioniq fives. It's like they were actively trying to get people to not lock their doors: the door lock button on the inside of the driver's door doesn't work unless the car is on. Attempting to lock the doors by any method won't work if any of the doors are open (so there is a lot of standing around for my family of four get out of the car). Coupled to that is the poor response of the capacitive touch button on the outside door handle. But of course, the car sends me notifications every 30 minutes telling me the car is unlocked. A better solution would've just been to auto lock the damn doors, or even make it easier to lock them in the first place.

For what it's worth, the door auto locking module I ordered is one sold by ioniq guy. He is reselling one that was built by shark racing, but he has added an adapter that plugs into your trailer hitch harness in the trunk, rather than having to splice into your car's cam system. For the wireless CarPlay, I had good luck with this set up. The trick is that you have to get a Y and a USB data pass through so that the dongle turns off when the car turns off, because the media port is always powered.