Peugeot design contest winner selected

Posted Fri Oct 3 2008 2:48 PM by Viknesh Vijayenthiran

The RD by Colombian designer Carlos Arturo Torres Tovar will be displayed at next year's Shanghai Auto Show

Peugeot's annual competition for up-and-coming designers for 2008 has concluded and a winner is chosen. The field was previously narrowed from around 2,500 contenders to a mere 29 finalists, and the winner was chosen as the best of that select group. The theme of the latest competition, now in its fifth year, was to "imagine the Peugeot in the worldwide megalopolis of tomorrow."

The winner of the competition, Carlos Arturo Torres Tovar, a 25-year-old Colombian designer, claimed the approval of both the Internet polling and the competition jury for his RD three-wheeled vehicle design. His award will be the construction and display of a life-size model of his design at the 2009 Shanghai Auto Show, plus €10,000.

As expected, most of the designs submitted focused on creating small, innovative city cars. The results were occasionally bizarre - for instance, second place finisher, the Ego, created by Turkish designer Emre Yazici, has only two wheels and is controlled by a joystick. While this configuration may not be the most practical in terms of handling or rolling over, when it comes to parking the Ego takes up just one-third of a single parking space and is able to rotate on its vertical axis.

While the entries abounded with single-seaters and electric-powered city cars, there were also entries such as the Rayo, by Croatian designer Ivan Kraljević. The car employs a striking grille and sporty exterior that makes it look more like a future Batmobile rather than a future Peugeot, but the designer did include a hybrid engine in the design in a nod to environmental concerns.

Last year’s winner was 20-year old Romanian Mihai Panaitescu. His Flux Concept Design was picked out of a field of no less than 4,000 entries. A full gallery of the top 10 finishers of this year's 5th Edition of the competition can be found below.