There is a fundamental problem with average golfers and their drivers: They hit the ball too low. That could be for a lot of reasons, chief among them, of course, is that they haven’t been fit for their current driver, which leads to a launch angle that’s too low. (Launch angle is the degree the ball launches above the horizontal plane of the ball before it’s hit.)
A recent Golf Digest test of average golfers showed more than a third had launch angles of less than 11 degrees. For golfers with swing speeds of less than 120 miles per hour (that would be about 25 miles per hour faster than the average golfer’s swing speed), a launch angle of more than 11 degrees is generally going to help optimize total distance. The reason your driver might not be launching the ball high enough could be tied to a lot of things, including your swing, whether you play the ball forward enough in your stance and even how high you tee the ball. The simplest reason could be that you might not have a driver that helps you hit the ball higher. And that could be because you don’t play a driver with enough loft. But it also could be because you don’t have a driver that fundamentally is designed to launch the ball higher.
In our player testing for the 2024 Golf Digest Hot List, we asked each player to rate every driver based on its ball flight on a scale from low to high. While each player was dialed into their specs by leading fitters from Golf Galaxy, players came away from each driver test with firm thoughts about which drivers tended to launch the ball lower or higher. In many cases, that was the result of the fitting where a particular model might lead the fitter to adjust the loft a little lower from its standard loft to produce an optimized ball flight.
But if you’re an average golfer looking for a little more height on your tee shots?in other words, like the vast majority of golfers?or if you’re that rare golfer who hits it too high, here are the drivers our players found to be the highest launching models naturally. Our lists are broken down by the three swing speed groups from our testing: Low (<95 mph), Medium (>95 and <105 mph) and High (>105 mph).