AUTOCAR’S ROAD test is the most exacting in the business, and our standards are high: before the start of this month our testers had awarded just six five-star verdicts since 2020. There’s a reason we don’t give maximum scores that often: to achieve one, by our definition, a car must be “unsurpassed” and “all but flawless”.
We didn’t hand out a single five-star road test verdict for the whole of 2023, yet just this month two very different cars have achieved that coveted perfect rating. You might have expected the Porsche 911 S/T, a road-focused spinoff of the GT3 that we tested in our 3 July issue, to impress: it’s the third five-star Porsche since 2020. This week’s perfect score (p48) is more of a surprise: the Skoda Superb, a massmarket diesel estate that majors on practicality rather than game-changing exotic sheen yet joins the likes of the Ferrari 296 GTB in acing our road test.