A Mazda competition to design the 2018 Mazda3 has been won by a female industrial design student who will now get to watch her design come to life at the 2007 Los Angeles Auto Show.

The competition was held in conjunction with social networking site, Facebook. It invited budding designers to visualize the 2018 version of Mazda’s best-selling passenger car. The winning design will be hewn from clay on the Mazda stand on November 14, with Mazda’s North American director of design, Franz von Holzhausen, lending a hand.

A landslide victory, 21-year-old Mallory McMorrow’s entry was voted number one by Facebook members. To enter, contestants submitted a 150-word description of their vision of the 2018 MAZDA3 and an optional sketch drawing.

After weeks of voting – first by Mazda designers, then Facebook members – McMorrow, of South Bend Indiana, was selected as a finalist, at which time she was paired with Mazda designer Jacques Flynn who helped bring her design to life on paper.

“Jacques took everything I said and sketched, and put my thoughts and feelings on paper,” said McMorrow, an Industrial Design major at the University of Notre Dame.

“I was thrilled when I opened up the images of the final renderings. I’m proud to say that the end design was still definitely my car and I can’t wait to see it come to fruition on the show floor.”

On November 14, McMorrow will begin working one-on-one with Franz von Holzhausen, director of design, MNAO, and his team to bring her concept to life, live from the Mazda booth at the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show. A formal press conference will be held at 12:50 p.m. (Los Angeles Time) Thursday, November 15, at the Mazda booth.

“The Mazda Design Challenge brought in a flood of cool, unique design ideas. The winning design concept is a fresh new way to look at the design of a vehicle,” said von Holzhausen. “This competition was a tremendous success, and the entire process was really beneficial to my team and me to understand what design means to our target buyers. Now the hard part comes – to see if we can actually build a full concept car on the show stand in ten days and in full-view of show goers.”