VCU news

By Leila Ugincius

For more than 100 years, the New York Auto Show has been the premier place for automakers to debut the newest models and designs. This year, among the elite designers and engineers revealing their latest concepts, a 19-year-old Virginia Commonwealth University student will show off her own design.

Alex Coyle, a sophomore, will showcase her winning design in carmaker MINI’s “Final Test Test Drive” contest. More than 800 MINI owners sent in their design ideas for the car. Ten finalists were selected to make commercials for their Originals Package design, which viewers were asked to vote on. Coyle’s “Midnight Black Light” commercial beat out the competition, and led to the design of the MINI DeLux.

Coyle describes the car as “a futuristic embodiment of light,” named Delux because “’lux’ is light, and it’s also a car with all the bells and whistles so it’s deluxe.”

Coming up with an entry for the contest was easy.

“Quite honestly — and it sounds vain — I saw [the contest] on Facebook and thought, ‘I could totally win this!’ Ha,” said Coyle, who is majoring in photography in the School of the Arts and creative advertising in the Robertson School of Media and Culture, part of the College of Humanities and Sciences. “So I wrote a script and filmed a short and got my entry in 10 minutes before the deadline.”

Actually uploading her submission, however, proved difficult, and Coyle had to make a Hail Mary pass.

“When I was uploading my video entry,” she said, “I was having technical issues. So in a last-minute panic I took a still from the video and uploaded my idea with the image. While the video did make it up in time, the agency somehow never saw [it] so I made it to the end based just on my idea in words.”

From the 800-plus ideas, 30 were chosen. Those 30 interviewed via Skype with Butler, Shine, Stern + Partners, the advertising agency that ran the contest and helped make the commercials. After the interviews, 20 contestants’ ideas were displayed online for viewers to choose one fan favorite — which was not Coyle — and MINI chose the remaining nine finalists.

“I was really just stunned at everything,” Coyle said. “To see tens of thousands of dollars poured into an idea you had right before your eyes is insane. In my video entry I rubbed some Irish Spring out on my deck (fun fact, Irish Spring is black light reactive), shined a black light on the ground, and filmed a little remote control Mini Cooper traveling over it.  

“To see that concept on a Hollywood scale is just incredible. Even now just thinking about seeing the set for the first time — I can't help but smile.”

Besides debuting at the New York Auto Show , which will be held from April 18 to April 27, the MINI DeLux will have a limited edition run of 56 vehicles.

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