I would suggest that if you really want to be productive in this years design, you learn Inventor instead. Your team should have at least one copy lying around and the tutorials are pretty good.
The reason I say this is that many of the parts you need to create models of design ideas are already available in Inventor. If you use Autocad, you have the learning curve of the software to deal with plus the gazillion hours of time it will take to draw all of the common parts.
FIRST CAD Library