Swiss Time Has Run Out

Did you hear about how the Geneva International Motor Show went this past March?  No?  That's because it didn't go at all.

It was canceled again?  Oh, no, it was held, all right.  

See how well-attended it was?

The truth of the matter is that the 2024 Geneva auto show was a bigger lemon than any of the Renaults shown in the picture above.  In May, its fate was sealed when the show's organizers announced that they were disbanding and that there would be no more auto shows in Geneva.  No one cares anymore.  Only a handful of major auto brands even participated in the show, and none of them offer cars for sale in the United States.    

All auto shows were in a degree of trouble by the end of the 2010s.  Then COVID hit in early 2020.  When the Geneva show was canceled that February, that's when I knew that this virus from China was serious.  The show was canceled for the next two years due to la pandémie de le covíde and in 2023 due to lingering COVID fears and "uncertainties in the global economy and geopolitics," though the organizers were happy to display cars in Doha, Qatar to appeal to crazy rich Arabs.  This year the show was finally held again in Geneva, but a funny thing happened in the five-year interregnum - people in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe decided to do something else with their time because they didn't really miss it.  

A lot of my own personal life was forever ruined by le covíde, and so were my plans for when I finally go to Europe - this show was on my bucket list.  But as I said before on an earlier post on this blog,  when would I ever find myself in Switzerland in March?  The organizers have since retrenched and regrouped to continue holding auto shows in Doha, but I have absolutely no plans to fly halfway around the world to a dry, sun-baked, oppressively hot city in the middle of the desert with horrible architecture when Las Vegas is so much closer.   

As for European car shows, there's always the biennial Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung in Munich (formerly held in Frankfurt), and the next one is in September 2025, but whether or not I make that depends whether we have a President who believes in freedom to travel wherever we want or a President who plans to turn America into a 3.8-million-square mile East Berlin.