By quirk of fate, or the simple happenstance of test car booking schedules, this week I find myself driving a Ford Mondeo. Which would be not at all mentionable, but for the fact that it is the venerable Ford's 25th birthday. Yes, just weeks before Christmas 1992, Ford unveiled the first-generation Mondeo to the world (and indeed the name was chosen because it sounded like world in some languages - Monde, Mundo, etc.) and Ford would never be the same again.

That was partially because the Mondeo was the first 'world' Ford, designed to be sold in the US, Europe…

The 2017 Automobility LA Design and Developer Challenge invited creative professionals from around the world to help Los Angeles host a global sporting event in the year 2060, with each of the 11 teams coming up with a film presenting their vision of what mobility, sport and life may be like in the City of Angels, 43 years from now. There was a main award for the Judges' Pick, but also secondary awards for the best visions for the Industry Pick and People's Pick. Here's a run-down on what came in.

Byton Design
Global start-up team, Byton Design, dreams up…

LA-based ZGF Architects, represented by Oscar Ramos and Sarah Winter, has let its collective imagination run loose with a 'multi-storey transportation system featuring magnetic-levitation lanes, Level 8 autonomy vehicles and transmuting structures'.

Now, that last bit is the most interesting - it basically means shape-shifting vehicles. Responsive Reconfiguration Technology (RRT) sees the vehicles adjusting their shapes, according to their passenger loads. The red Compact pods don't actually shape-shift, but instead accommodate 10 people seated and 10 standing individually, and can operate either on their own or as part of trains of vehicles.

The orange Mid-Sized machines have an EFTE-3000 membrane…

URB-E wants to give Los Angeles 2060 back to its human occupants, it says, by parcelling up the city into four mile-long-square 'Gigablocks'. In these zones, no cars or fast-moving transportation devices are allowed, making the streets totally safe for humans to mill about on them, checking their social media apps or generally just loafing from place to place.

Instead, everyone has a personal transportation device for the areas within the Gigablocks, which are ringed by arterial roads. A person wanting to go and view sport in another Gigablock messages the cloud as to where they want to go, and…

Italian concern Systematica, a transport planning and mobility engineering consultancy comprised of Anahita Rezaallah, Federico Messa, Filippo Bazzoni and Rawad Choubassi, went for a bit of the schmaltz factor, by imagining a conversation between a boy (seen on screen, but never heard - all his interactions come in the form of speech bubbles) and his grandfather (who, conversely, is heard but never seen).

In it, he recounts what LA was like in 1984, the last time the city hosted the Olympic Games, and the differences between then and the hyper-connected world of the future. The use of intelligent, autonomous cars…

Here's a brilliant one from Shanghai-based Qoros Automotive and its team made up of Tim Pilsbury, Dongho Lee, Jack Jiang, Martial Fonton, Ouyang Sheng, William Wu, Xiaoyin Li, Sean Pan, Marcos Beltrao, Diana Jiang and Zixuan Zhang. The approach used here was to focus on 'connecting existing and modified infrastructure like Union Maglev Station and Ocean City sport venues using amphibious vehicles with patented multi-directional Qoros Force-Field Wheel Technology'.

Rather like oiio's idea, Qoros reckons future types won't own cars, instead ordering up vehicles as and when they're required. In this instance, though, the whole machine turns up, and it's…