The crowd pressing its way into the Geneva show at 8am on launch day was in a funny mood. To the many who love it, the Swiss show has always been a gigantic gathering of car-minded friends, impatient for Europe’s automotive new year to get going. But this year many in the queue were expecting the show to be a recession-addled disaster, full of dull cars and sales projections heading for the carpet.
Such forecasts were wrong. It’s no secret that the car business is in big trouble, but the initial shock is past, and all good companies moved to survival mode months ago, one important strand of which is to concentrate on launching ‘core’ models you’re pretty confident will work.
Thus Geneva this year wasn’t chock-full of speculative new models. Rather, brands set about emphasising their core strengths and their faith in the future. Citroen, for instance, concentrated on injecting much-needed glamour into the small cars that have always sustained it. Aston Martin succeeded in convincing sceptics that its apparently far-fetched One-77 project was plausible, by displaying the sheer magnificence of the new car’s engineering. Most big players had new ‘core’ products to show. Geneva’s bit-players — the likes of Heuliez, Koenigsegg and Fioravanti — were still there, too, though showgoers wondered, even more than usual, what keeps them afloat.
Autocar.tv: see Mike Duff's in-depth Geneva show coverage
Lagonda Concept, Skoda Yeti, Rolls Royce 200 EX, Vauxhall Ampera, Nissan Qazana, Infiniti Essence, Bentley Continental Supersports, Ford Iosis Max
This is a big show for Aston Martin. It showed the million-pound One-77’s impressive carbon fibre tub and the hand-crafted magnificence of the hand-made, mostly alloy parts that will both propel and clothe it. It also unveiled a new Lagonda Concept, which shows that today’s Aston management sees the famous-but-moribund marque as the place for a giant coachbuilt crossover, the one major model type they don’t have.
Prominent among big manufacturers sticking to their knitting was BMW, which at last revealed its much ballyhooed 5-series Gran Turismo, an appealing, slightly taller 5-series hatch with variable loading and seating options.
Having at first feared it would turn out to be a car of weird format, like the X6 SUV, we have instead been given a desirable, extra-spacious 5-series.
Citroen showed its DS3. Project leader Mark Lloyd says the appealing little Mini-sized breadvan concept is 98 per cent similar to the production car we’ll see next year.
Volkswagen slipped its new Polo onto the stand, but it looks quite a lot like a Golf Mk6, especially from the front, so you had to look twice to notice. However, VW group product chief Ulrich Hackenberg promises a car with the Golf Mk6’s suspension and reckons it’ll work far better on British roads.
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