To say this week’s Frankfurt motor show is about green cars is about as obvious as saying it is about cars with windows and wheels.
The headlong rush by every manufacturer to produce or propose models emitting low – or no – CO2 has become such a ‘given’ over the past four or five international motor shows that you have to look deeper for the real trends.
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Frankfurt trends
Frankfurt’s huge car celebration has at least four of them. First, it shows (despite recent British experience) that the big, product-studded motor shows can still be highly relevant, provided it is backed a large, diverse local car industry with a pressing need to publicise new cars. The genre has not gone away.
Second, Frankfurt strongly indicates that most of the big industry players have found ways of coping with a sales downswing comonly described as “between 20 and 50 percent” and now believe we have reached or passed the bottom of the slump.
Third, the show seems to forecast – if the platoons of industry soothsayers present are right – that a recovery to pre-2008 sales levels will take several years (and in some cases will never be reached).
Fourth, it indicates a strong belief that cars of all kinds, which worked before in the market, will work again.
The build up
Take fast, expensive cars. For all the talk of greening, traditional powerful and high-performing cars are everywhere – at least in association with the show if not actually present.
On the way to Frankfurt, many hacks diverted to the launches of a new 200 mph McLaren and a new four-door Bugatti concept (both with the regulation efficiency stories attached) and within the Frankfurt portals they also clapped eyes for the first time on the Mercedes SLS AMG gullwing supercar, and Aston Martin’s Rapide.
All four – costing £150,000-plus – excuse themselves from the alleged economy rush by pointing to useful efficiency improvements and tiny sales volumes that won’t affect overall levels of atmospheric CO2, or make any difference to world fossil fuel levels.
Bentley versus Rolls-Royce
One unmissable big car event is the polite, once-in-a-generation confrontation between a brand new £200k Rolls saloon (the Ghost) and a new £200k Bentley (the Mulsanne). Most observers give the decision narrowly in favour of the Rolls, whose chiselled shape integrates sweetly with the full-size Phantom, but most now see that the Bentley’s design was done done no favours by a set of pre-launch photos which did not show it well.
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Re: Frankfurt motor show: morning round-up
Enjoyed the dig at 'Mercedes' empty seats'. You do know that was before the press confernce at 12:00 CET? Why do your writers persist with these silly, sly digs?
Daimler's press confence has just finished and was truly, in the words of Zetsche himself, 'Wow!' That was a presentation - son et lumière - and a half. Try no to be the cliched jaded, cynical hack.