Before this year, I had never gone down to the auto show. But seeing as I am in the market for a car, and the auto show provided lots of opportunities to take pictures, I headed down with Aaron on Saturday. Since I had never been, I was not prepared for the sheer size of the show. It filled the entire Metro Convention Centre (including the hallways), the Rogers Centre field and the concessions track. It was also quite busy, being a weekend, and also because the previous weekend was Chinese New Year. Although, usually we only had to wait 5 minutes max to try a car.

I won’t bore you to tears by blogging about all the vehicles I tried. The highlight of the show were the concept cars. Many of the major manufacturers had them: Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Mazda, Ford, Acura. They were all neat except for the Acura one, which looked like a sleek batmobile built for driving through traffic jams. I particularly liked the Ford SYN US. I thought it was cool because it didn’t have a rear window or side windows. Instead, each side and the back had a small camera embedded in the frame. The insides contained LCDs which are used in place of the windows. I don’t think it’s very practical because it would be trivial to block the camera lens with a piece of gum — actually I think that’s why it’s cool. I can’t believe the engineers thought to design a car without solving that problem.

In addition to that, the Ford exhibit had a Shelby GR-1 on display and a Ford GT (I think). So it wins for having the coolest cars. Honda loses for having the most boring exhibit, and Nissan loses for having a stupid display of their concept car. First they placed a wall of (dirty) glass between the car and the crowd, and second, the glass wall randomly becomes opaque to hide the car.

Then there were the fancy cars, the ones that will set you back a cool $450k, and that’s not even including taxes. It felt like going through a museum to look at these cars, you couldn’t get close and there were tons of people hanging around just looking at them. And of course, everyone has the same pictures! Unless of course you were one of the lucky few with a large enough wallet or knew the staff.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: cars