Auto Show Blues, Part Four

Forget the 2020 New York International Auto Show.

After postponing it from Easter Week to the week before Labor Day due to COVID-19, the organizers of the auto show have decided to just plain cancel it altogether, saying that they could not guarantee people's safety by holding the show in the middle of the pandemic despite the fact that New York and neighboring New Jersey have the virus under control.  Because who knows what it will be like at the end of August. Also, many people at the show would be from Michigan, a state that's still trying to slow the spread of the virus.  It's amazing that, apart from Hitler, nothing could stop the New York Auto Show before.  The Persian Gulf War didn't stop it.  The aftermath of 9/11 didn't stop it.  But a microscopic spiked ball of pathogen matter did.

Even without the pandemic, the 2020 New York Auto Show was still going to be a bummer.  Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen's Audi luxury brand both pulled out of the show even before the virus made the jump from China to the Western world, and BMW, having skipped the 2019 New York Auto Show, was planning to eschew the 2020 show as well.  True, Volkswagen was committed to the show, and it even planned to debut the ID.4 electric crossover in New York this year, but with Volkswagen Americanizing its lineup to cater to the ongoing monster wagon craze, I am certain that VW's display would have sucked, especially given the lack of attention given to anyone still interested in the Golf and given the fact that an all-new GTI (the base model appears to be on the chopping block for American VW dealers, a decision I'm still protesting against on my Mark 8 Golf blog) won't come out until September 2021.   

And because of the monster wagon craze, that's pretty much all you'd see at the displays from most of the domestic brands, except for pickup trucks.  The Asian brands still have hatchbacks and sedans - real cars.  And even though some of the vehicles that come out of Detroit are cars in the strictest sense of the word, let's face it.  After everything I've just said, is it really worth going to an auto show if all you're interested in is the new mid-engine Corvette?

The 2021 New York Auto Show is still on for Easter Week of next year, the same time it's always been since it moved in 1987 to the Jacob Javits Convention Center (which was turned into a COVID field hospital this past April, when the auto show would have taken place), but if going there means keeping six feet apart from people and wearing a face covering and not seeing the big German marques, I want nothing to do with it.  The pullout by Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and BMW are an indication that the auto show isn't what it used to be, as more auto manufacturers find new, more technologically savvy ways to market their products, and big exhibitions don't matter so much, so why bother with any of that?  The pandemic accelerated an already ongoing trend against the traditional auto show, which means I'd better not look forward to going to an auto show in Geneva or Munich - both of which were on my bucket list - after the pandemic is over.  But then, so what?  The old days and old ways of international auto shows are gone.