Hello, welcome to the podcast on Matthew. As we wrap up the year, I thought it would be

interesting to go back and take a look at the Edmund's top rated award winners from 2025.

I know Alastor and his team have been working hard on getting the New Year's winners list done,

but the best of last year are still great today. So let's throw it back to January of 2025.

Beginning of the year, Edmund's top rated comes out. This is all kind of exciting for the

manufacturers and for people that are shopping for cars

and for you guys it's just like a wipe of the brow going thank god this is over i've been

working on this for for four or five months and and you're just kind of uh after today maybe you get like

does your editorial team get like a day off at least?

Or how does that work?

Don't put ideas in the head.

Yeah, it's all of the above, really.

You know, we start these projects back last summer because you have to, I mean, we test everything,

but then there's also certain vehicles that you need to get in for testing for

the awards. And if you think about it, we launched the awards today in January 25, but we actually

test and have to create the content at the end of last year. So, excuse me, there's always a bunch of

vehicles that come out around November time that we're kind of like, you know, scraping to get into the awards, but we think are really critical. So you've got all that sort of pressure. You're working manufacturers. We need this vehicle. We need it now. We need it at the test track. Every vehicle that gets considered has to be through the test track. We have to do all that data. Then we shoot it in sort of end of November, beginning of December this year. Then, of course, you've got to put it all together. There's literally hundreds of different pieces of content, huge organisation across Edmonds, all the different teams involved. And then it all goes live at six o'clock this morning. So I've been up since five, you know, doing a bit of like QA, quality assurance on some of it. You know, there's always a few little niggles that go, you know, a few little things, the old backslash that's not in the right place or whatever. You know, stuff that people never see, but you're just internally. Mostly on the tech side, right? Like there's always, you know, something like, you know, a newsletter flaw or a little thing on the website. and a lot of it goes kind of unnoticed to most people. But yeah, for the team working on it for months on end, it can get, it can get frustrating. To be honest, it's been an awesome team effort. Like every year we try and raise the bar a little bit creatively. We try and raise the bar in terms of like what exposure we get for it. How are we doing?

We're doing some influencer stuff this year. It's like, so every year you just try and put in shit forward a little bit. I think this year, I don't know, I'm biased, but I think this year is our best, best creative. You know, it's a fun thing to do. You know, it's the end of the year. You get to shoot. you get the whole team together.

We're shooting down at a studio in Long Beach.

You've got all the fancy lights.

You feel a bit,

you know, I think like Paris Hilton had done something like the previous week or something. I don't know. You always feel a little bit, you know, you feel a little bit Hollywood for once. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so all of the information is on the Edmund's website. If you go there, you'll find it. But edmonds.com slash top rated. But let's go ahead and run through some of the stuff. We've got some, some, the main categories we have for top rated are car electric car SUV electric SUV truck and electric

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