Watch: Dacia’s David Durand on winning the Concept Car Design of the Year

David Durand: Well, I’m super honoured to win this concept card prize. In fact, we were surprised to see how much people appreciated the freshness of this concept. And probably it was not an object that people were expecting from Dacia – it was a bit surprising for the car designer professionals. In fact, we built this concept to communicate the evolution of our brand values, illustrating it in the design way instead of just talking about it.

We are not going anywhere near luxury or something, but trying to make the brands even more desirable and showing that design is not more expensive. It takes a bit longer, it’s a bit more complicated, but it’s possible to make a good design and keep it at an affordable price.

Getting this recognition from all those well-known car designers is really an honour for me. I’m very proud.

Car Design News: The word radical gets used quite a lot, but it is really a radical form. There’s minimal screens, there’s cork in there, there’s canvas. It feels really rugged. I’m just very curious as to when you presented this to the higher ups at Dacia, did they immediately believe in the concept or were they slightly sceptical?

DD: They were a bit sCeptical about the exercise, but we explained it very well saying, okay, if we took those brand values, what would be the extreme of those values. Sketch it out. And we didn’t know the answer before. We haven’t planned it. And we discovered the different drawings, and we realised that we had cars without windshields, without doors so you are feeling the air like on a motorcycle. And so we were super excited.

By the way, at the beginning, the plan was to make a full-scale model with no interior, but when we saw the sketch, we said, no, we have to realise the interior as well to show this interaction. We saw the idea of these concepts as a laboratory of innovation and ideas. There are little details that we will apply in our future production models…At the end it’s a really, really nice story.

CDN: The judges obviously agreed that it was a clear winner. So huge congratulations to your team, David.

DD: Thank you – I’m super proud and honoured to be there tonight.