Starting today and for the following nine days, more than a million people are expected to plunk down $10 each to attend the Los Angeles Auto Show. Little do they know, the show is already over.
The spectacle that is the automobile exposition is a breathtaking demonstration of the organizational skill, planning, logistics, design, vision, ambition and piles of money possessed by carmakers, which in a matter of days have once again erected a 760,000-square-foot temple in which to worship the four-wheeled vehicle.
All this, though, is not for you, dear reader. It's for us, the media.
Before the show opens to the public, thousands of reporters, photographers and bloggers are wined, dined and entertained for two days by the kingpins of Detroit, Tokyo and Wolfsburg, Germany, all in the pursuit of good press.
Among the heavy hitters in town this week: Ford Motor Co. Chief Executive Alan Mulally; Nissan Motor Co. and Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn; and General Motors Corp. Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. They met and supped with journalists Tuesday, made speeches and shook hands Wednesday, and were gone, along with the reporters, by Thursday. Party over.
And the people who actually buy these cars? Little more than an afterthought.
Asked at one of those private dinners to compare auto shows with the big trade events in commercial aviation, the industry he used to work in, Mulally smiled. "The biggest difference is that at air shows there are quite a few customers," he said.
Car shows are "all about making a venue to create publicity," said Andy Fuzesi, general manager and co-owner of the L.A. show.
Last year, Fuzesi bowed to pressure from carmakers and moved the show five weeks earlier to attract more press and end overlap with the show in Detroit. It cost him a 17% drop in paid attendance. "It's about addressing the needs of the industry."
And while none of this prevents the public from having a good time strolling the Convention Center to gawk at the sleek $1.46-million Lamborghini Reventon and the cute $11,590 Smart Car making its U.S. debut here, it casts a light on the clubbish, expensive and little-understood way some of the world's biggest companies sell their wares.
Car shows are almost as old as cars themselves. The New York Automobile Show, founded in 1900, claims to be the nation's oldest, and like nearly all of its peers, it was founded by a consortium of local car dealers to push sales in the slow winter months. Dealers brought in cars off their lots and had salesmen on the floor, ready to haggle.
