The quietest cabins at Wheels Car of the Year 2022

For this set of data, it doesn’t matter how quickly our COTY contender can get to 100km/h. They just have to be able to do it, so we can use a decibel meter at that speed, across a stretch of tarmac representative of a typical Australian highway.

We conducted the measure twice for each car to ensure a one-off anomaly wouldn’t spike the maximum decibels recorded, then we averaged the two readings (which were both very similar in each case anyway) to get our scores in the table below.

Much to the relief of Mercedes-Benz, and anyone who spends a couple of hundred thousand in the pursuit of luxury, the S-Class (65.4dB) was the quietest in the COTY field, by a couple of decibels over its little bro, the C-Class (67.1dB). Yet another pointer that the C-Class is becoming more and more like the higher end of Mercedes offerings.

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Speaking of the high end, our COTY winner is next quietest in line, the Kia EV6 measuring 67.25dB in the cabin. An EV being quiet should be no surprise, though the fact it ties with the twin-turbo V6 Genesis GV70 for noise is perhaps unexpected.

Not much louder, the BMW iX (67.65dB) is another EV that nails the interior ambience, though further down the list the Polestar 2 (71dB) was let down by tyre noise, and the Mazda MX-30 (74.4dB) let “boomy” noises (as described by judge Daniel Gardner) into the cabin on bumpy surfaces.

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We were surprised to see the otherwise quite refined Honda Civic (72.8dB) down the ranks, too, though we can obviously excuse the noisiest COTY contenders, the Subaru BRZ (75.75dB) and Hyundai i20 N (74.65dB) for being sports cars with deliberately enticing soundtracks.