THREE car companies have been honoured in this year's prestigious Red Dot awards with Honda, Mazda and Kia all picking up awards.

Honda came out on top with its all-electric Honda e city car winning the highest Best of the Best honour in the internationally renowned contest.

The Honda e also received recognition in the Smart product category, along with Honda's new CBR1000RR-R Fireblade motorcycle.

Meanwhile, Kia's XCeed was honoured in the annual awards making it the fourth member of the Ceed model range to receive a Red Dot prize.

The XCeed's accolade brings Kia's total number of Red Dot awards to 25 since the brand won its first in 2009.

In 2019, the XCeed's stablemates - the Ceed, Ceed Sportswagon and ProCeed - were individually recognised for their design strengths by the prestigious awards programme run by the Design Centre of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany.

In the Mazda stable the new CX-30 compact SUV and the company's first all-electric offering the MX-30 also received Red Dot Product Deisgn recognition - the eighth and ninth time the brand has achieved success in the awards.

Previous Mazda models pircking up Red Dot honours are the Mazda3 in 2019, the MX-5 RF in 2017, the MX-5 roadster, the CX-3 and Mazda2 in 2015, the previous generation Mazda3 in 2014 and the Mazda6 in 2013.

This year there were more than 6,500 submissions to the awards from 60 countries around the world.