Auto Shows Are Filled With Car Companies Spying On Their Rivals
But these contrasts aren’t reserved for car journalists to notice. The car companies themselves spend much of the auto show peeking at what their neighbors are up to.
“This is our chance to check out everyone else’s cars,” one unnamed auto executive told me at a competitor’s stand, “without getting hassled.”
You see tons of executives high up and low down striding across the show floor. Take a careful look at the name tags at flashy new car unveils and you’ll see that much of the big crowds are made up of junior German car execs, mostly making snide comments about how hard their rivals are trying to look eco friendly or whatever. And after these presentations die down, you’ll find those same bosses sitting in their competitor’s cars, often making snide comments about fit and finish. There are lots of lines about how panel gaps at Company X would be unacceptable at their Company Y.
The most famous instance of this is when the now-ousted boss of Volkswagen berated his staffers about the quality of a rival Hyundai at the Frankfurt Auto Show a few years back.
These exchanges are never meant to be heard by car journalists, and are very quickly dismissed as off the record if anyone catches an earful.
Most of the time these interactions are quite chummy, though. I watched Audi give an entire tech presentation to Mercedes bosses Erik Hauppenberger and Mahmoud Malek. I talked with Hauppenberger, who used to work on Maybach back in the day, and he was extremely casual about the interaction.
He’d been poking and prodding Audi’s dashboard of the future, running his fingernails along the edges of the touch screens, testing to see if the same swipe motion that worked on the volume also worked on the phone controls. (It didn’t.)
But still, he was quite keen to say that what Audi showed him was far from secret. They’d wheeled out this demonstrator to be used, and they were using it. The auto show is a show for them, too.
(Jalopnik.com)
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