Jan-Frederik Niehaus is a Bachelor student at the Aachen University of Applied Sciences (FH Aachen). While others were chilling out, he was busy designing cars – and now he has won the FH’s Automotive Design Award.

A car that looks good, is easy to construct, makes an impression and is a pleasure to drive – Jan-Frederik Niehaus has always wanted to design something like that. Even as a little boy he was fascinated by cars, and spent time thinking about their shapes and colours. After his Abitur, he enrolled at the FH Aachen to study design – the perfect choice for him: “Every semester, we have a new project. Furniture, products, cars – we do the lot.” When Niehaus heard that the car project also included a competition, he was determined to accept the challenge. “The creative market is highly competitive. So it’s important not to finish in fourth place but to come in first,” says Niehaus with great self-assurance. It is, after all, his great ambition in life to one day plan the car of the future.

And what do you know – he won first place. “The work – from the first drafts to the finished model – took a whole semester. And everything went really fast at the end – in just two weeks the model was finished,” he says. But the young designer didn’t have much time to celebrate his victory – on the day after the award ceremony his plane left for Australia, where he is currently residing in Melbourne as an exchange student.

First published in klenkes neo, Autumn 2018

FH Aachen student Jan-Frederik Niehaus (middle) and his car model, with which he won the Automotive Design Award of the FH Aachen. (Photo_FH Aachen_Pia Sonntag)