Meanwhile in Croatia, automotive designers met at the largest European event of this kind. For a weekend in Zagreb you could meet top car designers - from Peter Stevens, designer of mythical McLaren F1, to Carlo Gaino, designer of bizarre Lancia ECV 2. This mass orientated event mission is to promote automotive design. Auto® was packed with various happenings.

Panel discussion gathered around question how to define supercar today when their performance is matched by ordinary cars. 

Can EV be supercar was questioned in lectures by Chris Longmore, designer of Lightning GT and Adriano Mudri, designer of Rimac Concept_One. Alessio Minchella from IED gave an inside glimpse on car designers perspective of world and sources of their inspiration. Elena Ristancevska spoke on future trends in colour and trim.

Volvo organised design workshop for V40 exterior stickers that should underline Volvo brand values. Visitors could get their hands dirty in clay modelling workshop by Custom Creations under Dario Dropucic guidance. Three models were mad upon projects submitted to Design Challenge.

Other selected Design Challenge projects were presented through exhibition. 2012 task was to design urban electric micro vehicle (EµV). Winners have been chosen by conference speakers and Prof. Gordon Murray. 119 projects were submitted and winners are Stoycho Dobrev (BG) in Young Designers category and Mathew Rogers (UK) in Professional category.

 

For the first time The Best Designed Car Award was organised and prize giving ceremony took place as part of Auto® event. Winners for 2011 were chosen by the most expert car design jury ever conceived. List of 39 members include Patrick Le Quément, Lowie Vermeersch, Luigi Colani, Daniel Simon… Internet public referendum was also organised.

To keep things simple, overall design was valued in just two categories - concept and production cars. In Concept cars category jury has chosen Peugeot HX1, Renault Captur and Audi Urban Concept, on the other hand audience voted for Cadillac Ciel, Citroën Tubik and Jaguar B99 Bertone. In production cars category, jury and general public has chosen same cars as first and second - Porsche 911 and Citroën DS5 while for third place jury has chosen VW up! and audience Opel Astra GTC.