Mazda Design Challenge: Cars of the Echo Boomers
November 26, 2007

By Jane Nakagawa

If you walked up to the Mazda stand at the 2007 Los Angeles Auto Show, you didn’t see a concept car. Instead you saw a big lump of modeling clay with a couple of designers from Mazda R&D busily shaving away everything that doesn't look like a car.

As a promotion for this year's show, Franz von Holzhausen, director of design, Mazda North American Operations, created a design contest on Facebook. Participants were invited to submit a 150-word description of a 2018 Mazda3. Finalists worked with the Mazda design team to develop renderings of the concepts, then the Facebook community chose the winner.

Mallory McMorrow, a 21-year-old design student at the university of Notre Dame, won the contest and her concept was turned into a full-size clay model right on the Mazda stand at the L.A. show.

Car Girl

Affectionately called “car girl” by her classmates, Mallory McMorrow has always loved cars, but her academic studies in graphic and industrial design have previously allowed her to deal only with automotive cleaning and car-care products.

“All throughout college, I’ve heard nothing but how hard it would be to get into the auto design world, how I should keep my options open, and even how I should think about interiors -- because women work interiors,” McMorrow says.

In a twist of fate, a Notre Dame alumnus read about the contest on Edmunds Inside Line and informed McMorrow's professor.

Sports Crossover

The Notre Dame student had strong feelings about the kind of vehicle she wanted. "I was really focused on getting a really sporty crossover that was a sports hatch rather than an SUV crossover thing," McMorrow says. "Our program at Notre Dame teaches me to think like that –- we are much more about function and less about flash. Notre Dame used to do transportation design back in the days when Chrysler's Virgil Exner studied here in the 1930s, but now there's only industrial design."

Mazda's Franz von Holzhausen says of McMorrow's design, "We liked the idea of combining sportiness and utility in this vehicle size. This generation wants something that has a lot of image, but, you know, they’ve got stuff. They’ve got school stuff, they’ve got stuff they’ve got to carry around -- they've even got dogs, and that's why Mallory McMorrow's design has a little window in the rear that a dog can use to see out.”

Cars of the Echo Boomers

Mazda's von Holzhausen has good reason to take an interest in the car concepts of McMorrow's generation. At 21, McMorrow represents the core of the Echo Boom. Born to America’s wealthiest market segment, the Baby Boomers, this segment of the population is expected to change markets, attitudes and society for most of the 21st century.

There are 75 million Echo Boomers in the U.S. today, while the Millennials, their younger cohort, number  48 million. No wonder car companies are excited. The last of the Echo Boomers will be eligible for a driver license in 2010, and this means a huge new group of car buyers is on the way to the market.

It's no accident that Mallory McMorrow should come to represent the leading edge of this trend. The Echo Boomers are highly educated, especially the girls, as women make up almost 60 percent of the current college population. Since women today already make 80 percent of all household buying decisions, and income is highly correlated with education, it's safe to assume that most new car purchases will be made by women in the very near future.

McMorrow’s winning concept reveals the essence of her female Echo Boomer sensibilities. Her generation is not encumbered by traditional gender roles and thus her vehicle is gender neutral. Her optimistic spirit wants the car to have the soul of a sports car, but her inclusive and generous nature wants it to be able to carry her friends and her dog. She is confident enough to want to turn heads with maximum sex appeal.

A Better Mousetrap

The car industry is changing, because the target customers are changing. We saw what form the future will take when the full-size clay model of McMorrow's design was revealed on the last day of the L.A. auto show on November 24.

Photos by Mazda

1 - The completed clay model is unveiled on the last day of the LA auto show.

2 - Student Mallory McMorow shows off her completed work.

3 - The clay model in the works at the LA Auto Show drew a crowd.

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