Efficient, clever, unfriendly - that was only the Swiss: but the show itself was good, says Andrew Hamilton
The cars were undoubtedly the stars at the Geneva motor show but if you were only interested in the latest 21st century metal shapes, as concepts or production models, there was no probably no need to make the journey to the Swiss lakeside city. A show like Geneva is also about people, the whole panoply of stylists, engineers, marketing and managing directors, presidents and vice-presidents who ready their progeny for the market or in the case of a concept, use the exhibition as a test bed for reaction.
This formidable array of competitive people power from the world motor industry is - and we think always will be - the essence and flavour of motor show reporting. They predict and analyse and interpret through innumerable press conferences and interview sessions and of course, they are often adept at putting a gloss on a bad situation where it exists.
It actually exists in Europe right now, with too many cars chasing too few customers.The strengthening euro isn't helping either because the US market accounts for up to 60 per cent of European car makers' profits.
Lewis Booth, the Ford of Europe boss, didn't go for gloss, frankly admitting that last year was "bloody awful". The European division of the world's second-largest car maker lost nearly €900 million. This year things should be a little better: he is predicting the loss will be no greater than €200 million.
The European operation of General Motors - that's Opel and Vauxhall - is doing only a little better: the loss last year was €225 million. GM's worldwide boss Rick Wagoner is, however, expecting a break even situation this year. He told us he was surprised about Opel's decline on the Irish market with just over 6 per cent of new car sales during the first months of 2004. "How have we gone wrong?" he asked. The answer has to include bizarrely lumping the Irish market in with a Nordic group of countries: key marketing functions for Ireland were controlled from an office in Stockholm.
GM's recent remedy now has Ireland under the control of Vauxhall, the GM badge for Britain and Northern Ireland. So will we see Vauxhall-badged cars selling in the Republic? Kevin Wale, who is Australian and head of Vauxhall UK, said "emphatically it won't happen because Opel is familiar in Ireland and Vauxhall isn't". Otherwise, Opel models sold here will come with identical specifications to their Vauxhall counterparts.
The happiest people at Geneva had to be surely the Japanese, especially those in Toyota who seem unassailable in making good news for themselves. Last year, Toyota enjoyed its seventh consecutive year of record sales, being 10 per cent up on 2002. It is poised to have 860,000 vehicle sales this year and 1.2 million by 2010.
But Dr Akihiko Saito wasn't entirely happy: "Our problem is we don't have a strong brand awareness in key European markets like Germany, France and Italy. That is in spite of new hybrid cars like Prius and now the Lexus RX300 and the world's cleanest diesel engine. I know that in Ireland Toyota is very strong, at the top of the market."
The man with the most daunting task surely has to be Herbert Demel, an Austrian who was latterly with Audi and who is charged with reviving Fiat's fortunes. He spoke about aggressive cost cutting - €1 billion this year - and growing production volumes. By 2006 he promised that 21 new and restyled models would have been launched.
Growth is projected at 5 per cent a year for the next three to four years. If it all goes according to his plan, Fiat will be building more than two million vehicles by 2007, compared with 1.7 milion last year, when worldwide sales fell by nearly 9 per cent.
Top people in the motor industry are not just those top management types like Lewis Booth or Rick Wagoner or Herbert Demel. They are the styling or design heads, and as looks are now so vitally important for a car's market appeal, they are the elite when the credits are rolled out.
Just a few days before the Geneva show opened, there was the startling news that GM Europe's design director, Martin Smith had defected to a similar job at Ford. The new Opel Astra is his last major GM testimony. Succeeding him is Bryan Nesbitt, just 35 whose design portfolio includes the retro-style Chrysler PT Cruiser.
Mitsubishi in the past may not have been too synonymous with style, but it's all set to change through Frenchman Oliver Boulay who is their design chief. "I think our new Colt shows emotion and passion. I want our future Mitsubishis to be a bit different, a bit exotic even." He once owned an Alfasud, a GTi type Alfa Romeo and that was an influence on him in designing the new Colt. "Of course, it rusted and wasn't very reliable but I was so impressed with the looks and the chassis dynamics."
Maybe it's an appropriate postscript to briefly mention the Geneva show environment. The show itself is compact, efficient and well-organised, as might be expected in a Swiss location. But the inhabitants of this Calvinistic city are unfriendly, there are tortuous traffic jams, the taxi drivers go on strike and the hotels practise a simple form of Swiss moneymaking - a minimum stay of three nights.