2015 Suzuki Celerio
It looks as though the future of automotive design is in safe hands. A Mazda competition to design the 2018 Mazda3 has been won by a female industrial design student who will now get to watch her design come to life at the 2007 Los Angeles Auto Show.
Mazda held the competition in conjunction with social networking site, Facebook and invited budding designers to visualize the 2018 version of Mazda's best-selling passenger car.
Twenty one year old Mallory McMorrow enjoyed an overwhelming majority vote from Facebook members for her 150-word description and sketch drawing of her vision of the 2018 MAZDA3.
After weeks of voting - first by Mazda designers, then Facebook members - McMorrow, of South Bend Indiana, was selected as a finalist, at which time she was paired with Mazda designer Jacques Flynn who helped bring her design to life on paper.
"Jacques took everything I said and sketched, and put my thoughts and feelings on paper," said McMorrow, an Industrial Design major at the University of Notre Dame. I was thrilled when I opened up the images of the final renderings. I'm proud to say that the end design was still definitely my car and I can't wait to see it come to fruition on the show floor," said Mc Morrow.
The competition involves the winning entry being brought to life in clay and on November 14, McMorrow began working one-on-one with Franz von Holzhausen, Mazda’s director of design and his team to bring her concept to life, live from the Mazda booth at the Los Angeles Auto Show.
"The Mazda Design Challenge brought in a flood of cool, unique design ideas. The winning design concept is a fresh new way to look at the design of a vehicle. This competition was a tremendous success, and the entire process was really beneficial to my team and me to understand what design means to our target buyers. Now the hard part comes - to see if we can actually build a full concept car on the show stand in ten days and in full-view of show goers," said von Holzhausen.
Mallory’s vision is very confidence inspiring for car enthusiasts. If a Mazda3 is going to look this good then we may yet be saved from a world full of bland Prius-like electric cars...
