We’re delighted to announce that the brand-new Land Rover Discovery is our best tow car of the year, as revealed at tonight’s 2017 Tow Car Awards.

The annual ceremony, held at The Sculpture Gallery at Woburn Abbey, celebrates the top performers from this year’s test week, during which 44 models were put through their paces to see what tow car ability they have.

Full results of our 2017 Tow Car Awards will be published in the August 2017 issue of Practical Caravan, on sale tomorrow.

You can also head to our dedicated awards website and watch our video.

A hard-fought victory

You might think that with its predecessor having scooped our Tow Car of the Decade award in 2016, that the all-new Discovery 5 would be a dead cert for this year’s title.

But it didn’t have it all its own way, pushed extremely hard by a host of multi-talented rivals – including some strong in-house competition coming from the Jaguar F-Pace.

Every car was put to the test by an expert team from Practical Caravan, What Car? and The Camping and Caravanning Club.

We are hugely grateful to the Club’s volunteers, without whose hard work, passion and enthusiasm our gruelling test week could not happen.

We also must say a huge thank you to Swift Group for supplying a fleet of test caravans, and to Al-Ko for its assistance in preparing the tourers for the tests – stability data from Al-Ko’s ATC sensors forms an important part of our judging.

We are grateful, too, to Witter for help in assessing the towing gear and electrics, and to Milenco for the supply of towing mirrors and adaptors.

Check out our class winners

Our annual search to answer the question, “what tow car is the best?” is now in its 11th year, and we’ve tested almost 500 cars.

This year, as ever, we’ve separated the cars into five main categories, divided by weight, so that you can quickly find a choice of new models that will be suitable for towing your caravan.

In the ‘Up to 1400kg’ class, the Škoda Octavia Estate was back on top, its Superb sibling taking top honours in the 1400-1549kg weight division.

Jaguar also bagged two trophies, the XF going home with the top prize in the 1550-1699kg class, the F-Pace our 1700-1899kg class winner for 2017.

And in our heaviest weight category (1900kg+), the Disco 5 secured its first win of the night.

New awards for 2017!

There are further gongs for cars that don’t quite win their weight class, but that we judge to be outstanding in other ways.

These include Best Budget 4×4, Best Petrol Tow Car and Best MPV – and, for the first time, Best Pick-Up and Best Hybrid.

So grab a copy of our August 2017 magazine or head online, to see which tow cars are this year’s best of the best.