Kelley Blue Book Announces 2017 Best Buy Award Winners

original-kelley-blue-bookThe first Kelley Blue Book was published in 1926, as a method for Les Kelley to document what he was willing to pay for cars at his dealership. By the 1960s, his family was out of the car dealership business and operating as a specialty publisher focusing on the production of its automobile price guide. I can still remember buying my first car, and taking a trip to the library to look up values in their copy of the Kelley Blue Book, which was indeed still a book at that time. So I was excited recently to receive an invitation to Texas to get to know the modern Kelley Blue Book, a brand I’ve personally trusted for many years.

Since 1996, the information has been available and updated often on the internet, at the highly trafficked website, KBB.com. The famous Blue Book® Trade-In Values and Fair Purchase Price features of the website are well-known and used by many automotive buyers, but KBB saw an opportunity to go well beyond with their website. KBB.com is now full of automotive reviews, pricing information, and many other research tools which make it a one stop shop for all of your car-buying needs. Those resources have come to included a series of awards, which is what we were specifically invited to preview in Texas.

kbb-award-winners

Above are three of Kelley Blue Book’s 2017 Best Buy Award Winners (Honda Civic, Chevrolet Tahoe, Ford F-150), which we drove recently in Texas. The full list of award winners were just announced at the L.A. Auto Show today, honoring the top new model-year vehicle choices available in the U.S. market:

The Kelley Blue Book Best Buy Awards are designed to provide a significant service to new-car buyers by identifying the cream of the crop of all available 2017 model-year vehicles. The awards are the culmination of a year-long regimen of expert vehicle evaluation and testing of nearly every new vehicle available in America, along with analysis of a broad swath of vehicle-related data, including vehicle pricing/transaction prices, 5-Year Cost to Own data (which includes depreciation, insurance, maintenance, financing, fuel, fees and taxes for new cars), consumer reviews and ratings, and vehicle sales/retail sales information. Of more than 300 new-car models available for 2017, Kelley Blue Book’s expert editors initially narrowed the field to a few dozen Best Buy Award contenders in 12 major vehicle categories and then spent several weeks testing and evaluating all of the finalists head-to-head to ultimately determine the winners.

ford-f150

The 2017 Honda Civic was named Kelley Blue Book’s Overall Best Buy of 2017, but naturally since we were in Texas, we enjoyed driving the 2017 Ford F-150 the most. Here is what KBB had to say about the F-150 :

Radically redesigned with an aluminum-intensive architecture two years ago, the Ford F-150 has been named our Pickup Truck Best Buy ever since. Beneath the groundbreaking construction are a variety of advanced engines and transmissions, and a long list of clever features and appealing technologies. This year it adds one more trophy to its growing collection with its third consecutive Best Buy Award.

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You can see the full list of Kelley Blue Book 2017 Best Buy Award Winners at KBB.com, with each vehicle linking to a full review.