Last weekend I did something I've always wanted to do - I went to the Frankfurt Auto Show. As a car guy, it's on of the Meccas of the industry since (I think) it's the biggest show in the world.
Coworker and Austrian princess Julia and I hopped on an ICE train (the coolest, fastest, Star Trekkiest trains in the country) at 6 in the damn morning, and zoomed to Frankfurt where we met up with her boyfriend Michi (that's how the Euros shorten 'Michael'). Frankfurt is kinda lame - bad coffee, not much action, a lot of suits - but we managed to have a good morning. We met up with Boris, my new favorite Bulgarian, and dove into the show.
I'm used to the SF auto show which, if I remember correctly, fills up two and and a half halls of Moscone center. There are big booths from manufacturers like Mercedes that feature all the cars, some on rotating stands, a few girls with microphones, and a desk with marketing material. The Mercedes "booth" at IAA was an entire hall unto itself, maybe half the size of one hall at Moscone. It was two floors with a giant hole in the middle of the second floor so you could see down onto the first floor. The lighting, projections, and screens were straight out of a U2 concert, and they had a counter on the second floor that gave out glasses of water (with and without gas). All the new cars were there, along with a few race cars, artifacts from Mercedes' history, and what looked like exhibits from the Museum of Science and Mercedes. There were probably a hundred Mercedes people working. It was incredible. And BMW had the same thing (though it was less like a U2 concert).
The Ford group had its own hall for all its brands - Volvo, Aston Martin, Jaguar, Ford, Land/Range Rover, etc. And then there were halls containing several manufacturers each. There was the mostly Italian hall (my favorite) with Maserati, Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Fiat and... Hyundai. Poor Hyundai! They were all the way at the end of the most crowded hall of them all. So after pushing your way through hot human oatmeal to see the most passionate cars on the planet, you had to make a decision: do I push a little more to see Hyundai? As you can imagine, it wasn't really a decision at all.
And speaking of crowded, holy shit this thing was crowded. We were foolish enough to go on a Saturday and arrive around 11am along with the rest of the planet. Volkswagen was so crowded that you couldn't actually see any of the Volkswagens. And after our first visit to the Mercedes hall, where the line to get on the escalator was twice as long as the escalator itself, we decided to take a little break and wait for things to clear out a bit.
And about six hours later, we had seen everything we needed to see. I saw the new Ferrari F430 Scuderia which is my current dream car. The Alfa Romeo 8C looks as good in real life as it does in the pictures (though it's a lot smaller than I thought it would be). I stole three of the Mercedes glasses. And in honor of countless Thanksgiving day Moscone hot dogs, I ate a genuine Frankfurter sausage.
