Friday 27 / December / 2024
Muscat: Beijing Automotive Industry Corporation (BAIC) group’s representative concept car, OffSpace, developed by the Beijing Automotive Research Institute won the ‘Best Concept Car’ award at the second Chinese Brand Car of the Year and Best Designer Contest 2016 event. Car Styling, a leading magazine on auto design industry, presented the award.
BAIC is a leading automotive group in China with a comprehensive portfolio of products, from passenger cars to light commercial vehicles and heavy commercial vehicles. Gulf Great Sands is the exclusive importer of BAIC in Oman.
The judges of this contest included representatives of professional automotive design media, OEM automotive design directors and senior automotive designers. The judges included Shiro Nakamura, incumbent Global Design Director of Nissan, considered one of the top design directors worldwide, Akira Fujimoto, consultant of Car Styling magazine and Japan’s first car design reporter, Hiro Matsunaga, editor-in-chief of Car Styling, Hideichi Misono, former global design director of Toyota and Arakawa Ken, former chief designer of Mitsubishi and Mazda. The shortlisted corporate design leaders and chief designers held exchanges with the judges and presented their design ideas before choosing the winners.
Senova OffSpace is a unique crossover concept car, which displays the innovative design and exploration of BAIC in new fields. Representing innovative ideas, OffSpace features an SUV’s strong appearance and various functions. While the interiors have the super-large space of an MPV it must be noted that the long wheelbase and forward-leaning front windshield maximise the internal space. Besides, the large ground clearance and high water tangent design give full expression to its off-road performance and solid protection performance.
In addition, Senova OffSpace is committed to providing consumers with top quality driving experience. With increasingly improved auxiliary driving and automatic driving technology, a complete ‘cabin life’ is available in the car.
Thus, Senova OffSpace is not a concept car in the traditional sense but reflects the research and thinking of BAIC on future automotive design trends, as well as its attempts and explorations in intelligent technology and forms of human-computer interaction.
OffSpace also has far-reaching guiding significance for the new generation products of BAIC. Against the backdrop of its automotive development upgrade, BAIC developed OffSpace with a typically advanced design by extracting the genes of Senova to define the design language of new generation Senova products and apply it to cars in mass production. In the future, BAIC will conduct in-depth and meticulous research into human-computer interaction.
OffSpace was launched by BAIC during Auto China 2016. In July 2016, Auto & Design, another leading automobile magazine, featured the concept car giving its photographs front cover display. This was the first time a Chinese brand concept car was covered by a top-notch magazine.
