Sturmey Award Winner 2015: Mark Lloyd

摘要

The Autocar award for innovation this year honours the man behind the launch of the Citroen C4 Cactus and the DS brand. Citroen design strategy director Mark Lloyd is the kind of bloke who sees opportunities, not problems. "Back in 2009, it was a pretty bad time for the economy," he says. "I gave a presentation about where I thought we should go. I opened it with images of world catastrophes from throughout history and highlighted the effects of those situations on accelerating change. I wanted to demonstrate the energy that can be harnessed from times of stress." Fast forward to a sunny day in April 2015 in the centre of Paris, and Lloyd is a vision of contentment, as well he might be as he navigates the traffic at the wheel of a C4 Cactus, a deliberately polarising car that his stark words in the boardroom six years earlier helped to make a production reality. It's for that foresight, coupled with a relentless desire to think differently, that Lloyd has been honoured with the 2015 Sturmey Award, named after Autocar's founding editor, Henry Sturmey. The award was created in 2014 to salute innovation and achievement in the motor industry, and Lloyd was selected by judges not just for his work on the Cactus, the underlying philosophy of which will influence future Citroen design, but also his role in establishing the DS brand.