Detroit auto show on life support - Crain's Detroit Business

The North American International Auto Show is canceled. Again. Rescheduled. TBD.

The news this week that the show's organizers were once again stymied by the coronavirus — the show was canceled for its June 2020 posting and rescheduled for September before meeting its current fate. Two sources confirmed Michigan's automakers ultimately pulled the rug out from under the show this coming fall.

Instead the show blends into a luxury car event in Pontiac called Motor Bella. The move is an instant blow to Detroit, which relied on the estimated $400 million in economic activity the show generated from hotel room rentals, dinners and other associated events, and which held an auto show in its city limits since 1907 until 2019. (A federal ban on new auto sales during World War II put the auto show on hiatus 1941-53.)

The question on everyone's mind is: Will the North America International Auto Show return to Detroit in 2022?

The answer is murky and complicated, but it's still probably yes. There's little evidence to suggest it won't. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan told reporters earlier this week that "Ford, GM and FCA all made an absolutely solid commitment that they will not be supporting anything in Pontiac this year unless there's an unequivocal commitment for the auto show to be back downtown next year."

But it won't be the auto show we remember. Detroit's auto show was already in flux for nearly a decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizers called for transformation as the industry slowly abandoned the big-ticket reveals and media blitz of auto shows' past. Attendance never recovered after the 2008-09 financial crisis that led automakers, including then-bankrupt Chrysler and General Motors, to scale back the multimillion dollar displays. Let's not forget Chrysler in January 2008, before the financial crisis, led an over-the-top 120-head cattle drive through downtown streets.

The rise of social media in the 20-oughts proved a game changer for the auto sector's marketing strategy. The automakers no longer had to rely on the capital-intensive auto shows to reach the wide audience of automotive journalists. Now, automakers could stop competing for print media space in just two days in Detroit and engage those same journalists at their own independent event and watch those same journalists distribute the news instantaneously across digital channels.

Why unveil the latest and greatest production sport utility vehicle inside TCF Center (formerly Cobo) under thousands of fluorescent bulbs when an automaker can fly a cadre of journalists to Moab, Utah, and show journalists the vehicle's real capabilities under the bright desert sun?

Hell, in 2017, BMW abandoned unveiling its M5 sports sedan in Frankfort or Detroit and instead let the car debut in the Electronic Arts' Need for Speed Payback video game. By 2019, all three German automakers had abandoned the Detroit auto show.

Hundreds of automakers and suppliers moved offerings — now focused on mobility, connectivity and autonomy — to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which also occurred in January and severely cut into the auto show's standing in the last decade.

NAIAS tried to recapture the now tech-centric auto sector in 2017 by launching a new exhibit and seminar program called Automobili-D. The new entry into the show program was meant to showcase new industry tech and be autonomous- and electric-vehicle focused. But the new addition never blossomed into the CES-killer it had hoped.

This precipitated a new aggressive strategy in 2019: Move the show from January to June in 2020 and make it a tech-heavy festival to showcase Detroit's summer vibes and allow these new technologies to be "experienced" instead of just seen. But COVID derailed that gambit.

If the show does return in 2022, there will have been a roughly 40-month gap since the last show in Detroit. That gap is providing automakers ample opportunity to rethink the age-old show system executives have been rethinking for more than a decade.

Let me be clear. Automakers don't want another North American International Auto Show. For now, it remains unclear whether the industry will forge ahead with its "festival-like" approach to Detroit's big show or wholesale abandon it, leaving it as a hollowed-out regional show.

And let's not dawdle here. There's nothing wrong with the Detroit auto show reverting to a large regional show where auto dealers simply reap the rewards of showcasing the latest cars customers can buy RIGHT NOW. More than 800,000 potential car buyers — it's estimated as many as 55 percent of attendees intend to buy a car in the next 12 months — walk into TCF Center every year.

Glenn Stevens, executive director of Michigan's auto industry marketing association MichAuto, said the city will make the show happen by sheer will because of the dollars it generates.

"What's important to Detroit from a economic standpoint, we can't lose this epicenter we've created," he said. "The institutions and the ability to gather people around an event, that's a big part of the equation. We need to figure that out."

For that reason alone, the Detroit Auto Dealers Association that puts on the show will not let it die. It shall return but it may not be what we had expected or even hoped for.

The North American International Auto Show is dead. All hail the auto show.

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