Stellantis Drives to Encourage School-Age Car Designers
Stellantis enjoys a long history of compelling vehicle designs and of nurturing the designers that produce them. The company’s expanding that legacy with its 2026 Drive for Design Junior contest for kids from kindergarten to ninth grade.
The junior competition joins the annual Drive for Design contest for high schoolers between 10th and 12th grades. It aims to encourage the creativity of young artists with an automotive bent. The new junior contest is divided into three age groups: kindergarten to third grade; fourth to sixth grade; and seventh to ninth grade.
This year’s theme is “Design the Future of Fast.” To participate, the students must create a design following that prompt while using a Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, or Ram vehicle as the focal point of the design for the future.
“Designing an SRT vehicle means unleashing a fearless mindset and dreaming up performance-driven ideas that look fast even when they’re standing still,” said Mark Trostle, vice president of Ram Truck, Mopar and SRT exterior design, who himself won this competition years ago. “We can’t wait to see how students of every age push the limits and redefine what fast, powerful and downright awesome can look like for the next generation.”
The design team will judge the entries, picking one grand-prize winner from each age group, plus two additional finalists from the valid entries. For detailed contest rules, information on how to submit sketches, various prize packages and free resources for students of all ages, visit StellantisDriveForDesign.com.
All student-created entries must be submitted by noon EDT on Thursday, April 23, 2026. Students, teachers and parents can follow contest updates on Stellantis North America’s Facebook and Instagram channels using #DriveForDesign, the company noted.
[Images: Stellantis]
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Michael Strong has spent more than 25 years writing about the automotive industry. A Detroit-area native, he’s written about everything from local car shows to product reviews to financial news. Currently he writes and edits for a variety of national and local publications. He’s also a longtime member of the Automotive Press Association and the International Motor Press Association, and a graduate of Georgia Southern University. Hail Southern! Despite a love for ’70s land yachts and BMWs from the late ’80s and early ’90s, his personal vehicle is neither of those.
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slightly related, when i was in high school, i was taking engineering classes, was thinking about being a mech engineer and working for automakers. my engineering teacher pulled up a cad file one day and told us about one of his former students, who now works for ford. we all thought this was pretty neat of course. he told us how he went to our states engineering school and had big dreams making cars and what not. so not only did he get hired by ford, but he was working on one of the teams designing the s197 mustang! then he revealed the cad file. he told us this was his submission for his teams task. it was a door handle. he was part of the door handle team. his submission was not selected. for better or for worse i did not want to be a car engineer anymore.
One could go full Tesla CyberTruck and start at kindergarten.