The all-new Mazda MX-5 RF has just been announced as a winner of the "Red Dot: Best of the Best" title at the 2017 Red Dot product design awards, while the all-new Seat Ibiza also took a Product Design 2017 accolade.
The Red Dot Awards have been among the most prestigious design competitions in the world since they were first created in 1955 by the Essen, Germany-based Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen, providing international recognition to design quality and innovation.
The Mazda KODO: Soul of Motion design language philosophy may have sounded a little grandiose when it first made its debut at the 2010 Paris Motor Show, but it's been nothing short of an enormous success for the company ever since. The new philosophy came in when Laurens van den Acker left the company, and his successor replaced his controversial Nagare design language with an approach seen as more serene than provocative. KODO takes its inspiration from a powerful animal's stance when waiting to pounce on prey, or from the ancient Japanese martial art of kendo when a sword is about to strike.
The MX-5 RF is basically the retractable fastback version of the current MX-5 roadster, which itself drove away with the exact same award back in 2015. The RF retains much of what's made the MX-5 such a huge success, but it adds that hard top that takes just 13 seconds to retract at the push of a button and can be operated while driving at speeds of up to 6mph or 10 km/h.
The "Best of the Best" award is exactly what its name suggests as it's the highest honour available from the internationally acclaimed annual competition, so a design has to be genuinely outstanding and groundbreaking to take the prize. According to the award organisers, designs named as "Best of the Best" winners are products created by design visionaries who manage to deliver a perfect balance of harmony of quality, desirability and usability.
For three decades now, the Ibiza has been the cornerstone of the Seat range, and the latest model is now able to stake a claim to being the best design the Spanish brand has ever delivered into the supermini segment. The design is about more than just looks, though, and the Seat won the award thanks to its dynamic behaviour and driving quality, its impressive on-road stability, significant improvements to its interior quality, safe and user-friendly technology, and its enhanced comfort.
A panel made up of 40 experts from around the globe assembled to decide the winners of the 2017 Red Dot awards in 47 categories, which included cars and motorcycles. Jurors can be from any industrial manufacturing company, although they cannot participate in a vote where products they may have been involved with are contenders.
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