GrabCAD, Automotive Design Conference and Car Design Community have collaborated to launch Urban Electric Micro Vehicle Design challenge.
Urban mobility is a hot topic right now, but traffic jams have been around since Babylon. One hundred years ago Peugeot hired Ettore Bugatti, then a young Italian engineer, to create a small car for mobility in Paris. After WWII, the average European could not afford a car, so in the 50s and 60s many budget microcars, nicknamed “bubble cars” emerged. Now, microcars are coming back!
By 2015 thirty million scooters will be sold annually. This niche is so big that manufacturers are starting to create vehicles just for this demographic. Motorcycle companies are experimenting with larger and more feature-filled motorcycles while automotive companies are shrinking their vehicles. These companies are all fighting for the same consumers.
We challenge you to create the most desirable urban vehicle of all times: http://grabcad.com/challenges/urban-e-v
The winning design, as chosen by automotive design experts and speakers at Auto(r) 2012 Automotive Design Conference. The jury including:
- Frank Stephenson, Design Director, McLaren
- Gordon Murray, Gordon Murray Design
- Peter Stevens, 2002 Automotive Designer of the Year by AutoCar Magazine, Peter Stevens Design
- Sébastien Stassin, Kiska
- Automotive Design Conference speakers
First staged in 2009, Auto(r) is one of the world's most important automotive design conferences and the biggest one in Europe. This is world's only event where automotive designers address people who are not professionally connected with automotive industry. This mass orientated conference mission is to promote automotive design as part of industrial design and to popularize automotive culture in general. Number of visitors is constantly growing and event itself became automotive think-tank. The event offers unique networking opportunity and is proven as a place where new ideas are born.
