Geneva diary
Show insights from Hilton Holloway
Tuesday, 8.30am
Welcome to the future. It wasn’t just that Geneva 2019 was lacking in traditional car maker displays and full of electrified innovations from scooters to £2m hypercars. There was also the background hum of some of the world’s most powerful multinationals wondering how they can cope with a tidal wave of legislation and social pressure pushing them towards the significant expense of adding kwh to crankshafts.
8.45am
Took a good look around the new Corolla estate on the Toyota stand. There’s no doubt that the brand has made huge strides in interior appeal and perceived build quality. Let’s hope a hybrid that’s made in the UK won’t be ignored by domestic buyers. One notable detail: the Corolla’s centre console switchpad is an absolute vision of where the motor industry is heading.
9.00am
Ran into my old friend Gert Hildebrand, who was Mini’s design director for a decade. Now retired, he questioned how cars’ development time has been shrunk so dramatically that an afternoon’s sketch on a computer can be milled out as a full-sized model overnight. He might be right about a creeping design crudity.
9.35am
As you might expect, there was no shortage of new SUVS, especially compact ones. A cure for SUV exhaustion might be Mercedes’ new CLA Shooting Brake. It was easily overlooked perhaps, but the new platform allows amazing amounts of interior space to be carved out under the smart swooping lines, and the interior is a gem.
10.05am
The Mercedes stand also saw another giant pointer to the future, with what’s expected to be a last hurrah for the iconic V12 engine. So taking up significant space was the new plug-in S560e limo, which is powered by a V6 hybrid petrol engine. Mercedes claims just 59g/km of CO2. That gives a good idea of the inevitability of plug-ins, because next door to it was a petrol C200 4Matic. According to the new energyrating sticker, its 167g/km figure puts it in the lowest efficiency category. The sticker also bore the comparison of a comparable pure EV rating of just 38g/km. You can see the pressure car makers are under.
11.20am
Next door to Mercedes was the BMW stand, working under the giant hashtag #JOYELECTRIFIED. For drivers, perhaps, but probably not for future profit margins.
11.45pm
One of the upsides of the empty space at Geneva was a big exhibition for Abarth, a brand celebrating its 70th anniversary at the end of this month. The display of these mostly tiny cars was a joy.
11.55am
Right next to Abarth was a small stand showing an electrically assisted bicycle powered not by a small battery but by a tiny fuel cell, itself fuelled by a canister of hydrogen. The project has been developed by Linde, a huge chemical company. It’s a great idea, but I wonder if the canister would be road legal?
12.20pm
Perhaps the most eye-opening exhibit was a full-size model of a car designed in the 1950s by noted Italian architect and designer Gio Ponti, best known for the Pirelli Tower in Milan, who died in 1979. The Linea Diamante is said to have been Ponti’s reaction to car design of the time, which he saw as encompassing ‘useless bulk’. His car was said to have been influenced by the post-war hard modernism beginning to be seen in architecture. Useless bulk or not, Ponti completely failed to anticipate the 1950s and 1960s being the high point of Italian car design.
12.40pm
Wandered through the big Honda stand, pondering the collapse of the brand as a player in Europe, where it sold fewer than 150,000 cars last year. Yet two of the models on its stand – the CR-V and the compact and practical HR-V – sold 736,000 and 646,000 units respectively around the globe last year. It’s truly mystifying.
1.20pm
Perhaps another straw in the wind, away from SUVS and back towards what Ferrari last year referred to as ‘the age of elegance’, was the appearance of four classic cars each wearing skis on their roofs, as was the way of the movers and shakers in the pre-range Rover age. Especially engaging was the early Porsche 911 on its maker’s stand and the reborn Stratos on the MAT stand.
2.50pm
Audi’s stand hosted pure EVS and a range of bigger cars with new plug-in hybrid drivetrains. But the upshot of Audi’s descriptive naming policy has led to the longest chrome boot badges yet. Audi A8L 60 TFSIE quattro, anyone?
3.30pm
Mercedes’ Smart brand was founded 25 years ago, on the eve of this year’s Geneva motor show. Everything about it was supposed to point to an imagined future: city centres restricted to conventionally sized vehicles, new types of factories that could build to order and a massive shift towards greener, cleaner values. Yet the brand has suffered an extremely difficult and costly existence. The two-seater was rebooted again at the show, reminding us that the future sometimes doesn’t go to plan.