It makes sense how they do
It makes sense how they do their judging, but not necessarily why they do it that way. Maybe it is an award system that they built on the way that legacy automakers and magazines used to work. Where they worked on developing cars many years in advance and announced new models at car shows, and published several months after the cars were reviewed because of printing lead times. But much of today's new car news comes out daily and weekly. So we will only know about a few of the cars that will be released and sold in 2021 by January. It's OK, as this group will probably have the first automotive awards of the year, if not the most representative of 2021 cars. Either way the Mach-E seems to be deserving of praise, and this award will give it recognition to compete better against the leading legacy ICE model competitors. So that's good.