A car for life and for the joys offered by life, that was the slogan shaped around the JOYSTER, a concept car that ŠKODA took to the 2006 Paris Motor Show. “Jens Manske, the then chief designer, wanted a car designed especially for Paris. The task was to come up with something that would radiate love, beauty and emotion,” recalls designer Jiří Hadaščok, whose various responsibilities in the past have included, for example, the exterior of the 2018 modernised FABIA.

The JOYSTER was a springboard project for his future career. “I had worked as a modeller up until then, a job which encompassed the ŠKODA YETI concept car of 2005. The JOYSTER was the next concept car. I brought a few drafts to Jens Manske and he immediately put me in one of the three teams responsible for designing this car for Paris. Although my design didn’t make the final cut, as my colleague Jan Tuček was selected for this project, that didn’t matter at all – it paved the way for my role as an exterior designer, and that was a dream come true for me.”

“Mass production was never the ambition,” says Jiří Hadaščok, “But we wanted to show what an A-entry model could look like – the first car young people or a young family would buy. Although the Joyster was not a forerunner of any particular model, many solutions used in it actually appeared in ŠKODA vehicles later on. For instance, the wheel design was used in the ROOMSTER SCOUT and the FABIA SCOUT, the large glazed surface that extends from the roof through the rear window and then as far as the tailgate appeared in the RAPID SPACEBACK, and the square-shaped grille was subsequently used in other ŠKODAs.”

And what is the point of making concept cars that are never meant to reach the mass production stage? Well, it makes perfect sense, actually: people working in development and at management levels have ideas, visions, as to what directions ŠKODA cars should take. We can discuss things, but discussions without tangible solutions do not get us far. We need to check out various ideas to move forward. The Design Department is a sort of lab for new technologies – many new things would never be developed if this team did not exist. Take the headlamps and taillights as an example: if the designers had not designed narrow lights, there would have been no pressure to develop new technologies allowing smaller lights to be made. Without the Design Department, we might not have any modern LED lights on our cars today.