Thank Frankel it's Friday: Is the Detroit Motorshow dying?

So when I started going there almost 30 years ago it was no surprise to discover that its motor show was one of the three most important in the world. And unlike Frankfurt that was and remains incredibly straitlaced, and Geneva which is enjoyable but massively hard work, Detroit was always fun. The city brimmed with confidence, its show pumped full of razzmatazz. The launch of a new car was something not simply to be unveiled, but celebrated. I remember cars being dropped from ceilings and driven through walls. Once Dodge employed 10 cowboys to drive 120 longhorn cattle down Washington Boulevard to announce the arrival of a new Ram pickup.

But as I boarded the Delta flight back to the UK on Tuesday evening, it all seemed like a very, very long time ago. 

This year’s Detroit show was as notable for who didn’t turn up as who did. None of the true luxury brands – the Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Ferraris and Aston Martins of this world – fancied the depths of the Michigan winter – and while the premium brands were there, their major product releases were not. BMW brought its new X2 crossover though in truth that had already been seen in very similar concept form. So it was left to Mercedes-Benz to produce a genuinely new car.

The irony was that the new G-wagon (I still can’t bring myself to call it by its official but prosaic G-class title) looked like a car that was almost 40 years old. Indeed I thought this the familiar motor industry ploy of calling a merely mildly refreshed car ‘new’ when in fact it’s the same old soup with a bit of hot sauce thrown in to spice up the taste. Not so. Indeed Benz boss Dieter Zetsche claims the only components carried over from old to new are the door handles, the sun visors and the headlamp washers. The rest of the car is completely brand spanking new. And as an object lesson in how to preserve your heritage while keeping it relevant, I don’t suppose I’ve seen it done better. The interior looks like that of an S-class limousine, while the exterior architecture, though changed in every dimension, panel and detail, gives the impression of having survived intact. I cannot describe how much I hope Land Rover has taken a similar approach with the new Defender: an engineering revolution within a merely evolutionary design. 

Otherwise, the domestic brands produced a series of new pick-up trucks, which while doubtless crucial to the home market were of little importance beyond. This was a hollowed out show, a show going through the motions despite having lost its relevance on the world stage. And why? That is hard to answer but to me, the decline seemed to start ten years ago when the global financial collapse brought the Big Three to the very brink. I think that event knocked the stuffing out of Motor City and though Detroit the place is staging a remarkable comeback, its motor show – the North American International Auto Show to give it its full title – has not. In the meantime rival shows in New York and Los Angeles have been swift to capitalise on its hardships. 

To me, the shame is I’ve always loved this town and I used to love its show. Even now Detroit feels real in a way that super-rich Geneva and Frankfurt, Tokyo and Shanghai and most of the other places we go to look at cars do not. There’s a grimy honesty about the city that speaks to me of all that has happened here and its unparalleled importance to the history of the automobile. But unless manufacturers from both home and abroad get behind it, I can see only further dwindling of its importance, a path that in time can lead only to oblivion.