What's the next hot movie car?

A car that flies and climbs skyscraper walls. And it can drive too. It’s the winner of an annual design contest that has been trying to find Hollywood’s Next Hottest Movie Car.

Car companies around the world competed in the Design Challenge as part of the recent LA Auto Show, and micro-car maker Smart took the gong with 341 Parkour urban vehicle -- a car designed for a hypothetical movie the Daimler-owned company called Annie Gets the Grannies. We can only ponder at the vision behind that, but it promises to have the potential for plenty of action as the vehicle features driving, flying, and climbing modes, using vacuum cups and retractable wheels to scale walls and take flight.

This year’s winning Smart vehicle followed their granny thread of last year, with the 2010 car they proposed would be knitted from carbon fibre by robot grannies – which sounds like a horror movie – so that “the knitting can create complex shapes and forms, enabling the geometry to be optimized in strength and weight”.

But there was some strong rivalry for first prize, from the design studios of American, European and Japanese car makers. 

Honda designers imagined a dystopian future High Noon where scientists create a vehicle based on the remaining DNA of a legendary creature once known as a horse. This is evolved into a vehicle called the IH, which “uses the efficient, lightweight, strong, and functional characteristics of bones for its inspiration. The IH vehicle combines both the character and simplicity of a horse with the latest structural, safety and technological innovation”.

Hyundai followed the current vampire fad, with two vehicles designed for the Countess of Siberia -- born in Moscow in 1829 of vampire parents, and with superhuman senses. The Countess Elena is fitted out by Hyundai to help in her war against communism around the globe: the Hyundai Stratus Sprinter multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) and the DB Atlant Airship that serves as her home base and MPV carrier. “The MPV can travel any road due to its high ground clearance and has light combat capabilities. The Airship stays afloat and hidden high in the sky to avoid detection. Both vehicles have a magical stealth force that renders them invisible during daylight, only to reappear after dark”.

Maybach reinvented Cinderalla as a “Berline Carriage Engineer who spends all her days working at her father's workshop, while her wicked stepmother and stepsister party. “On the night of her birthday, Cindy's father surprises her with a beautiful dress and allows her to take a new Maybach prototype out on the town -- a reinterpretation of the historic Berline Carriage. The Carriage is teleoperated via a satellite link to a Maybach Virtual Chauffeur Centre. This leaves maximum interior space for the passengers and also allows maximum privacy. A large glass screen with 3D laser projection is suspended from the ceiling and can display the Virtual Chauffeur or a variety of media and entertainment.”

Mercedes-Benz’s Silver Arrow racecar was the central player in a proposed movie where two enlightened crash test mannequins, Hans05 and Franz02, battle against the evil Dr. Crash-Barrier’s reign of terror and mayhem. The two heroes take action to save their beloved Silver Arrow  -- a long-slung, sculpture on hooped wheels, with body lines that recall  Formula 1 cars and a diagonally configured, hub-less roller track for 'Omni-Directional' driving.

Subaru looked far into the future -- 200 years after the rotation of the Earth has stopped, and the planet split into two, distinctly different hemispheres, the Daysphere and the Nightsphere. Humans have been living in a highly developed civilization in the Nightsphere, away from the sun's harmful electromagnetic waves. They have electricity sourced from an innovative energy plant but the fuel, a rare crystallized mineral, is running out. A team sets out to find it in the Daysphere -- a place from which no human has ever come back alive – travelling in the Ultra Subaru HORIZON designed to withstand the strong electromagnetic field, chemical imbalances, scorching heat, and raging storms of the Daysphere.

The Design Challenge has been running for eight years, with the annual theme set by a board of design studio execs and the world’s top car design studios invited to take part. The panel includes Pixar Animation Studio art director Jay Shuster, Academy of Art University director of industrial designTom Matano, and Detroit College for Creative Studies chair of transport design Mark West.