FUTURE PROOF
What does the future hold for the motor show in a post-COVID world, ponders Paul
“FOR YEARS, CARMAKERS’ TURNING UP AT SHOWS WAS DRIVEN BY FEAR”
Many things have been absent from my life this past year, leaving me feeling bereft and sad. I won’t list them, though, because you might think me trivial. After all I’m still healthy and so are my loved ones, and the existence of this page of text testifies I still have work. You might have been less lucky and if so I’m sorry.
After this misery, do motor shows count among the things we miss? Maybe not. Even before COVID scythed in, they were pretty much on their knees. Not enough people went, either to investigate cars to buy, or to queue up for ages to enjoy a fleeting caress of the unaffordable ones. Latterly many cars weren’t there anyway, their makers having lost the appetite for spending millions to park in a noisy, sweaty shed alongside their rivals. Hardly a differentiated premium marketing environment.
For years, carmakers’ turning up at shows was driven by fear. They didn’t know which visitors were likely buyers and which were tyre kickers. Their nightmare was that one of those unknown buyers would miss them and spend with a rival. They had to be in it to win it.
It hasn’t been like that for a while. If you’re their target, they’ll already have your data: who you are, where you are, what else you like doing and eating and watching. So they’ll get in your face with targeted digital marketing, and come to meet you with a pop-up display at your favourite sports event, festival or shopping street.
So motor shows are changing. Frankfurt was the apotheosis of the old sort. A teeming city of vast car brand cathedrals, it had become self-defeating. It took so long to trudge around you’d inevitably miss stuff. It imploded in 2019 – pre-COVID, note.
Its replacement will be in Munich this September. But not just a motor show, oh no. It’s the Munich Mobility Show. All the German carmakers have signed up, but it won’t be the usual pissing contest row of giant stands. They’ll be mixing it up with tech start-ups. It’ll fill many of the squares in this compact city. You’ll be able to take short test drives. There will be scooters, ‘micro-mobility’, pushbikes, shared and multi-mode transit, livestreamed digital events. A conference will likely include anti-car speakers. The event’s head of comms tells me, “If Greta comes, good.”
It could go either way. Maybe all these new facets will draw in more people, not least the families of the hardcore petrolheads, and give the show a new life. Or the loss of focus might cost it the critical mass of us old guard. Detroit, that most motorheaded city, had announced in 2018 something not altogether dissimilar for 2020. But of course that never happened so we never found out how well it worked. The Los Angeles show has also tried to be a multimodal digital event, but it always felt like little more than a squirt of ketchup to pep up a not-very-tasty motor show.
Motor shows had to change. We just don’t yet know how.