Škoda has a new party trick: an app concept that supposedly knows what you want before you do. It’s called the Vision App, it just picked up a Red Dot Award for Design Concept 2026, and its headline feature is an AI assistant named Laura who has apparently decided that waiting to be asked is for lesser software.
The old MyŠkoda app was content to tell you whether you’d locked the doors — a modest, trustworthy sort of app, the kind that minds its own business. Laura is not that app. Laura wants to prep the car before your trip, fuss with the settings, sort out the charging, and even referee logistics between everyone going on the drive.
Then, once you’ve actually finished the journey, she’ll apparently stitch together some kind of shareable memento of it, because nothing says “I just drove to the in-laws” like a auto-generated recap.
It’s worth pausing here to note: none of this exists yet. Red Dot’s Design Concept category is explicitly for ideas that may spend “months or years” wandering the wilderness before reaching an actual app store, if they ever do. So Laura, for now, lives entirely on concept screens — a very promising, very hypothetical co-pilot.
Škoda is filing all this under “Simply Clever,” the brand philosophy that used to mean built-in umbrellas and ice scrapers tucked into the fuel cap. Times change. Apparently clever now means software that anticipates your road trip instead of just keeping your windshield ice-free, which is either progress or a sign that the ice scraper well has finally run dry.
This isn’t Škoda’s first design trophy — an earlier app concept won a Red Dot back in 2021 — and this latest win brings the company’s total across all categories to 21. Whether Laura ever graduates from award-show darling to something on your actual phone remains, notably, unconfirmed. For now, she’s won over a panel of judges.
The rest of us will have to wait and see if she’s coming for our glovebox.
