Car Design News Contest 2008 Winners

It's been five months since the Car Design News Contest 2008 brief was first announced. And now, the last of our nine esteemed judges have completed their assessment of the 20 finalists. We are pleased to announce the winners in the professional and student designer categories, respectively: Jay Wen from New Zealand and Seyyed Javad Ghaffarian from Iran.

Based from what he observed while living in Shanghai, Wen expects exceeding numbers of inhabitants will look to a new kind of transportation. As such, he created his winning 'T-PO' design as an answer. Wen describes his design as having a 'robot-looking' direction behind the surface language to give occupants a feeling of privacy and protection. The 2.7 meter long car was designed to "stand out from the crowd by expressing personality and the joy of using transportation, and as a multi-functional vehicle that brings fun and convenience in one".

The design is also notable for having a ball front wheel and rear wheels on legs that retract in from the shown positions to aid maneuverability. It takes automotive, product and motorbike form languages, mixes them and convincingly adds something fresh to deliver a very advanced, 2028 design aesthetic.  

"It's very dynamic, and an excellent model," remarked Ajay Jain. Luiz Alberto Veiga, Bryan Nesbitt, Li-Chih Fu, Ralph Gilles, and Martin Smith shared their fellow judge's opinion in choosing the T-PO as the best professional designer entry.

Ghaffarian's ‘Magic Tricycle' design is described as having an "organic aerodynamic body which represents a new form for a car". It has a unique concept that drives on all three wheels for normal highway use, but can also rotate around a longitudinal axis, running from the front to the rear wheel on the right side. This enables the left wheel to be elevated into the air so the vehicle can be driven as a motorcycle in more congested areas. To facilitate this, the seats rotate to keep the occupants sitting upright and the airborne wheel opens up blades which work like a helicopter tail propeller to aid stability.

In the motorcycle position, the shape of Ghaffarian's design is almost symmetric, but in the car position the shape is completely non-symmetric. The design is described as tring "to break the common rules of designing a car" through a vanguard form.

From the start of judging it was clear that this was one of the judges' favorites, with Gorden Wagener, Martin Smith and Shiro Nakamura all giving it their highest mark.

Coming in a close second place in the student designer category was Jongpil Shin from South Korea with his 'Arius' design, and in third place was Igor Yastrebov from Russia with his design, 'Milly'.

In the professional category, Nicholas Dunderdale from the UK came in second place with his design 'Kassou', while Jussi Timonen from Finland was in third place with his 'Biohive' design. 

Continues → 

By CDN Team