Deciding which car is best out of 56 cars is a more arduous task than one would imagine. Two decades ago choosing a great car was easy, you only had to look to the Germans to find the best. But technology and perseverance have sought to change that over the years.

The improvements in manufacturing and dynamic handling have improved across the board. Regardless of country of make or brand, it is becoming an increasingly difficult task to find a bad car. Even the Koreans have proved they have arrived with the new Hyundai Genesis.

Nevertheless our team of road testers who’ve been hard at work the past year driving the best the industry has to offer have devised the following points to give you the car of the year.

This year's 56 entrants have been split into 18 categories that best represents each body type. The entrants are grouped to their price range, performance and engine capacity (in that order of importance). To keep it fair and relevant, one important factor of our award is that we only honour cars we’ve tested or were launched within 2014.

Besides the 18 categories, we've included a Special Category for Greenest Car of the Year for the most fuel efficient car of 2014.

The nominees are judged based on the scoring system below where they can score up to 10 points in each section.

• Comfort
• Performance
• Design
• Practicality
• Interior

Green being our theme this year, a bonus criteria for 'Is it Green' has been added. With a base point of 10, cars with a fuel efficiency figure of that is below 12km/L will minus 1 point for every km/L below the standard and plus 1 point for every km/L above.

As with previous years, the final results will be a combination of our reader’s votes and points given by our editorial team where each is side is given equal weightage for the final tally.