Big Money Prizes for BMW Prototypes
The BMW Urban Driving Experience Challenge had one goal – transform a BMW or Mini into a “socially responsible machine that contributes to our global well-being.”
That’s quite a vague challenge as crowdsourcing contests deliver the best results when challenges are tightly scoped. But BMW received a plethora of great ideas from which three winners emerged.
The contest was run by the crowdsourced vehicle design platform Local Motors, and for phase one of the contest, the Local Motors community was asked for cutting edge concepts for premium urban cars of the future.
During this period 3,500 design boards were submitted from all over the world in support of 400 concepts. Although each entry was unique some underlying common themes emerged including – car sharing, ganmifcation and doing good.
Doing good was the theme that BMW decided to run with for the challenge’s second phase. Participants were set the objective of taking a resource within standard vehicle parameters and coming up with functional uses that could be classed as doing good.
Crowdsourced Contest Winners
The first place winner was Cosmin Mandita of Romania. Her “BMW Light My Way” concept cuts down the energy consumption of street lights. The idea is to keep lampposts just in important places, and parked cars would provide the rest of the night-time illumination.
Proximity sensors built into cars would recognize when pedestrians are near and activate their lights. Cosmin won $7,500 for her idea, a trip to Munich in Germany and lunch with the Managing Director of BMW Group Research and Technology.
The second place winner was Xavier Gordillo of Spain for his “BMW Connected Park”. This is a modified BMW that can communicate with other vehicles forming an interconnected network. An example that he gave of how this would work would be a mother who had lost her child.
She could approach a car to explain the emergency and it would activate cameras in other cars to spot the child. The concept could also help drivers find car parking spaces. Xavier won $2,500 for his brainwave.
Third place went to James Lin from the USA for “The Lifeboat”, a car model that provides emergency electricity, can turn into a shelter and be a Wi-Fi hub for emergency communications during disaster scenarios. He won $1,500 for the idea.
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