Hyundai Prophecy concept wins 2020 Car Design Award

South Korean carmaker Hyundai has been awarded the prestigious Car Design Award for its Prophecy concept EV, unveiled earlier this year as a hallmark of the company’s “optimistic futurism”.

Three cars drove away as winners in this year’s Car Design Award, as judged by a raft of influential automotive journalists from around the world. First awarded in 1984, the Car Design Award was presented for 14 consecutive years through to 1997 before a lengthy break which was broken when the awards were reintroduced in 2016.

This year’s winners were the design teams from Hyundai for the Prophecy in the Concept Cars category, Ferrari for the Roma in the Production Cars category, and Porsche Design in the Brand Design Language category.

Both the Concept Cars and Production Cars categories have a long history as part of the Car Design Awards, while the Brand Design Language award is given “to the design team that has worked best to maintain the consistency and transversality of a brand’s formal language over the entire product range.”

This is the first time, however, that the Awards ceremony took place digitally, broadcast from Turin on the Car Design Award YouTube channel due to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Hyundai’s win for the Prophecy is an important step forward for the company’s EV plans. The judges praised the Prophecy’s ‘nautical’ inspiration “in the form of such details as the heat-extracting, propeller-style wheels” and pixel headlamps and taillamps “that give the rear a sports car-like flourish.”

“It has been a real pleasure working on this project, and we are delighted to win this prestigious Car Design Award for ‘Prophecy’,” said SangYup LeeSenior Vice President and Head of Hyundai Global Design Center.

“When we develop our concept cars, we look everywhere for inspiration, whether it’s the fashion or mobility industry. With ‘Prophecy’, we tried to create a really positive optimism for the future based on very simplistic single curve forms that are memorable of eras of aerodynamic and streamlined cars but projected into the future.”

The Driven’s own Bridie Schmidt described the Prophecy as displaying “a smooth nose, cat-like headlights and panoramic roof, the Prophecy concept certainly looks the closest we’ve seen to the styling of the Tesla Model 3.”

“From the side however, the Prophecy is something else,” Schmidt added. “A generous wheelbase with a truncated rear end and a spoiler reminiscent of Italian design house Zagato stand out both literally and figuratively, contributing to the aerodynamics of the car along with the asymmetrical rims.”

“We have brought to life yet another icon that establishes a new standard for the EV segment as well as pushing Hyundai’s design vision to even broader horizons,” said SangYup Lee, head of Hyundai’s global design centre, speaking in March.

Hyundai announced in August that it intends to build three more electric cars to be introduced under a dedicated Ioniq series, beginning in 2021, with the Ioniq 6, expected in 2022, with a design drawn from the Prophecy.

This is part of the Hyundai Motor Group’s plans to sell 1 million units of battery electric vehicles and to take 10% of the global EV field, both by 2025.