About MotorGPA
MotorGPA grades cars the way a school grades students. Every vehicle sits an identical exam — 102 criteria across 10 subject areas — and comes away with a 0.0–4.0 GPA, a letter grade in each subject, and a rank within its class. No brochures, no sponsored placements: just the same rubric applied to every car.
Real specs, not just star ratings
Most of what we grade is a real, measured number — towing capacity in pounds, MPG, headroom in inches, price in dollars — pulled from manufacturer spec sheets, EPA data, and NHTSA/IIHS results. You see the actual figure, and it's normalized within its segment so a truck's MPG is judged against trucks, not against a Prius. The rest — ride comfort, reliability outlook, tech usability — is scored with cited evidence.
How a score becomes a GPA
Grading runs on a 0–100 scale internally, then maps onto the 4.0 scale on a fixed, published curve: 45 points is a 1.0 and 88 is a 4.0. The anchors are constants, not a curve against whatever happens to be in the catalog today — so a car's GPA never shifts because other cars were added or regraded. The report card shows every weight, band, and threshold.
Graded for your life, not just the spec sheet
Every vehicle also carries fit scores for four real ownership missions — family hauler, daily commuter, work & towing, and road trip & adventure — so the answer to "best for me" can differ from "best on paper." The lifestyle quiz turns your answers into a shortlist.
Independent and unsponsored
No manufacturer pays for placement and there are no affiliate rankings. The grading framework and the grades are open — see the full report card for every subject, weight, and normalization band.
Where the figures come from
Specs are taken from the manufacturer's own documentation and from the federal and independent testers — fueleconomy.gov, NHTSA, IIHS — before any secondhand source, and a figure we can't verify is marked at lower confidence rather than guessed. Research and the written assessment are AI-assisted; the scores themselves are recomputed from published bands and checked by a validator that runs before every release. How we grade sets out the full standard, including what the model is and isn't allowed to decide.
The grading, explained
The rules above are set out at length in the guides — how the GPA scale and the weights work, what each report-card subject actually measures, why whole classes of vehicle grade the way they do, and rivals compared head to head. Every figure in them is read from the live scoring data when the site is built, so a guide never quotes a number the scorecards no longer agree with.
Found something wrong?
Specs change mid-cycle and we get things wrong. Send us the criterion, the correct figure and where it's published, and we'll check it against the primary source and recompute the grade. Report a correction or get in touch.