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As hard as I tried during AJAC's TestFest of new 2008 models, I couldn't find any losers, dogs or obvious nightmares — the cars you'd look at and say, "What were they thinking?"

There were no AMC Pacers and no Gremlins, no Pontiac Aztecs, no Chevrolet Chevettes, no Ford Edsels and not a Pinto in sight. Where, oh where, were the Yugos and the Ladas?

I simply could not find a car that started to fall apart during a test drive. I looked at all the track-test-generated speed and braking scores, but could not find a single ride with a four-hour 0-100 km/h time.

As I wandered the field at Niagara regional airport — the one littered with dozens of new cars, pickups, minivans, sport-utility vehicles and crossover wagons — I simply did not come across a thoroughly schizophrenic design, a gas-guzzling behemoth. Just one, give me just one ugly, underpowered deathtrap, I begged! No luck.

Boring is how I'd describe the three days I spent testing entries in the 2008 Canadian Car of the Year Awards. The so-called "TestFest," folks, was a no-fun affair. None of the 59 entries spread out over 12 categories could be the obvious butt of a joke.

Worse, the whole event — organized by a large committee of volunteers from the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC) — went off with agonizingly smooth precision. Even the electric bar-code reading devices used to track who was testing what, for how long and when — well, they worked. The young workers from Georgian College's auto marketing program recruited to work the event were friendly, knowledgeable and efficient.

Yuck! Like any good critic, I was looking for a car I could vote Best Hot Tub or Best Fish Bowl or Best Pregnant Roller Skate. I wanted something that surely would start to rust on the showroom floor.

I climbed in and out of vehicle after vehicle, looking to find just one for which I'd need a pry bar to get out of the back seat. I peered underneath, hoping to discover a sieve-like engine block leaking fluid all over the field. Please, I begged to the heavens, show me a car that might explode in a rear-end collision.

No such luck. Okay, I wasn't rear-ended to prove the point, but I did research all sorts of crash-test scores and found nothing untoward to worry over. The organizers of TestFest don't do crash testing — I used U.S. government ratings and those from the U.S. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety — but the AJAC testers do generate all sorts of their own performance data; you can find the data at AJAC's website www.ajac.ca .

The point is to give the 74 voting journalists in attendance some raw facts and figures to go along with the subjective judgments that go into the voting for winners in all the 12 categories — from basic family cars like the Chevy Malibu to dream cars like Audi's R8, and everything in between.

AJAC as an organization — and in the interest of disclosure, I am a full voting member — wants consumers to trust the reliability of the scoring, the fairness of the voting, the value of this testing process to determine the best and rest of the new 2008 models. The journalists in attendance spend three days conducting back-to-back testing in controlled conditions, both on the track and on local Niagara roads.

All of Canada's mainstream manufacturers bring their entries to this annual event, and pay a fee to participate. Full-line auto makers such as General Motors and Toyota spend tens of thousands of dollars to join the party, bringing large numbers of staff to prepare the entries and answer questions. But once they turn the car keys over to the AJAC organizers, the process is out of their hands.

We, the jurors, then go about our business of driving vehicles on preselected roadways, over routes designed to show the best and the worst of each model. And for trucks and sport-utility vehicles, there was also a special off-road course, too.

First-year members of AJAC are allowed to participate, but their votes do not count. Second-year members have votes worth only half that of full-fledged veterans. And that's only a small part of this complicated voting process.

AJAC has created a rating system that crunches all the voters' scores through a computer program. In all, there are 21 different rating categories. The final scoring is weighted according to overall merit (40 per cent), value (20 per cent), environmental factors (10 per cent), safety (10 per cent), market significance (10 per cent) and emotional appeal (10 per cent). The accounting firm KPMG adds up the numbers.Now keep in mind the ballots reflect the views of a group of writers and broadcasters whose abilities and experiences differ considerably. So the whole complicated testing process is intended to educate voters and keep TestFest from becoming a popularity contest.

This approach did not materialize overnight. In fact, the voting system has been refined over many years. The big change came several years ago, however. Then, a simple point system was replaced by something far more detailed and complex.

Now, the peculiarities of individual vehicle types — for example, off-road capabilities of SUVs — are specifically targeted on the score sheets in various vehicle classes. Meanwhile, all entries are rated for shared attributes such as fuel economy and safety. The goal in all this is to ensure that all cars are treated the same in a given class, regardless of their size or features.

The process isn't perfect and from time to time some very large oddities crop up. For instance, last year's AJAC TestFest of 2007 models did not have a minivan category because there were not enough new minivans for a competition.

Worse for me, though, putting all these new cars and light trucks in one place over such a short period of time proved to be an exercise in frustration. That is, auto makers can be criticized for many things, not least being their reluctance or inability to adjust pricing to reflect the massive and very quick rise in the value of the Canadian dollar.

But as a group they simply are not producing any really awful vehicles and there is nothing funny about that — literally. Awful.