Does South Africa have the potential to become a great country for designing cars? Yes it does!
South Africa is known for a lot of things: Tourism, food and, unfortunately, Appartheid. But despite the large automotive industry in the country, there are no local car-brands. Growing up as an amateur car designer in South Africa is hard, cuz there’s no formal institutions in the country that specializes in that field. There are tons of design-schools in the USA, UK and Italy, but none in South Africa. The Perana Z-One is a proundly South African supercar, but it was designed in Italy. There are a lot of potential car designers in South Africa, and we want to make our mark on the designing world. I designed the Chrysler Nelatti when I was 13 (10yrs ago).
Over the years I have made improvements in the design and the final versions of the Nelatti & Nelatti GT are still very close to the original design. I met a guy on Facebook few years ago, who is also an amateur car designer from South Africa, and he was able to design the 3D models of my Nelatti. I entered the Nelatti in a 1-and-a-half year international car design competition hosted by the Dutch car company, Vencer Automotive, between May 2012 and December 2013. Vencer wanted to produce a follow-up model to their first car, known as the Sarthe (set for production in 2016), and chose a design competition as a platform. They decided to host a public-vote based competition via Facebook ‘’likes’’. Unfortunately, this system proved to be unreliable and prone to cheating. My Nelatti mainly competed with a design known as the Vencer Jetstream. The Jetstream was the lead design with 600+ likes by the time I entered my Nelatti in 50th place. The Nelatti gradually gained more likes and went up a few places until about the last 4 months of the competition, when it was knocked-out, along with the Jetstream, of the top 5 by cheating designs. The Nelatti and Jetstream ended up in 6th (2000+) and 7th (1800+) place respectively, out of 350 entries, with the Nelatti being the only South African design in the top 50. If the Nelatti wasn’t knocked out of the top 5 so suddenly, then it would’ve actually won the competition. Every entry had a date-stamp. So any entry that has achieved to gather a significant amount of ‘’votes’’ within as very short time period, is suspicious. My Nelatti was in the competition for 1 and a half year and it slowly managed about 2100 likes in that time period, while the winning design was entered 4 months prior to the deadline and gained 8000+ likes just like that out of the blue.
In October 2012, the South African automotive magazine, CAR Magazine (a derivative of the UK CAR Magazine) decided to host their own car design competition. The winning design would get a chance at being developed into a prototype by Jaguar and judged by a Jaguar-designer. The only ‘’hitches’’ was that the design must be a Jaguar, and that it was another public-vote based competition via Facebook (again). Fortunately, CAR Magazine controlled the amount of entries with an entry-deadline, and only after that, did they post the competing designs on their facebook page and the top 3 designs were featured in the last 2 sections of a 4-part article in the December and January issues of the magazine. The 1st part of the article (featured in the October issue) announced the competition and gave a briefing of the rules; the 2nd part (Nov issue) featured an interview with the main judge; the 3rd part (December issue) announced the top 3 designs (not specifying which is in the lead); and the 4th part announced the winner. The competition was launched as a response to the former editor’s interest in car design, and it serves as a showcase for what amateur South Africans are really capable of.
South Africa has produced some international talent:
Gordon Murray - Legendary British/South African that designed the McLaren F1
Pierre Terblanche - Lead designer of Ducatti Motorcycles
Rory Byrne - Semi-retired designer for the Formula One Teams, Benetton and Scuderia Ferrari
Keith Helfet - Designer of the legendary Jaguar XJ220
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.490139751010751.116925.133715953319801&type=3
https://www.facebook.com/ScardesignA/?ref=br_rs
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