Detroit Auto Show Blues

After a three-year absence brought on by COVID, the North American International Auto Show in Detroit returned this month, today being the last day of the show.  The most notable display at the show may have been this vehicle.

That sums it up.

Any auto show that relies on a display of the Flintmobile car that George Barris developed for the 1994 "Flintstones" movie to draw crowds can't be all that good.  And to think, in 1994, while The Flintstones was being shown in theaters, the auto show circuit that year featured the Volkswagen Concept One, which became the New Beetle.  My, how times have changed.

By all accounts, this show has been a big snooze fest.  Only two highlights came out of it - President Biden's visit to promote new American EVs and the debut of the seventh-generation 2024 Ford Mustang, the last real car Ford produces in this country.  Most of the displays were smaller than before, according to Lalita Chemello of Jalpnik.com, with almost nothing in between - least of all live bodies. In short, like Detroit itself. "More than anything," she wrote, "what was most notable was the emptiness — the swaths of blank walls, the shocking amount of bare space between cars."

She's right.  Look.

President Biden's appearance at the Detroit auto show was notable for the vast emptiness around him, and it had less to do with providing maximum security for the President than the paucity of show attractions - there was simply nothing there.  Looking toward the end of the pandemic during an interview with "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley as the two of them walked through the convention center, the President noted that no one was wearing face coverings.  Well, of course they weren't, there was plenty of room for social distancing!

Chemello wonders if auto shows have a future.  It's increasingly unlikely that they'll survive, given how more efficient it is for automakers to promote new product online and how expensive it is to set up a traveling show of props and product presenters for the auto show circuit every year.  Heck, the cars themselves are uninspiring - more and more SUVs and pickup trucks, and they're dominating the electric-vehicle market as much as the traditional internal-combustion-engine car market.  I can count the number of new cars I find impressive on one hand with fingers to spare, and that's certainly not much of an incentive to attend an auto show when I would have to spend more time getting there and going home than actually being there.         

I'm sure President Biden had a good time at the Detroit show.  He probably didn't have to pay to get in.

At least the Detroit show is now being held in September, at the start of the new-car model year. Who the heck wants to go to an auto show in Detroit in January anyway?