All The Fun Of The Motor Show
The Geneva Motor Show was all on last week and, as usual, was a real drawcard for motoring enthusiasts all over Europe and beyond. One wee post isn’t going to be enough to bring you all the cars that were revealed to the world. But one of the things that we all enjoy about motor shows is seeing the things that the designers have come up with but just aren’t going to make it onto the road for real. This is a great improvement over motor shows in the bad old days when the only thing that the companies could come up with to attract viewer attention was draping scantily clad young ladies over their latest offerings. Now they have to use a bit of imagination.
Once again, the Geneva Motor Show of 2013 didn’t disappoint, and the designers came up with the weird, the wild and the wonderful. It seems as though no company is too staid and conservative to come up with something quirky. Whether these offerings are bizarre or beautiful is a matter of opinion… see what you think.
One offering that was certainly eye-catching came from Land Rover , with their Hamann Mystere. If you saw it in black and white, it was anything but a bush-bashing Land Rover – it looked like a cross between a sports car and a 4×4, with low ground clearance but the characteristic chunky looks of Land Rover. But that wasn’t what made the Hamann Mystere stand out from the crowd: the colour was the thing, and it was a shade of metallic pinky-purple that is about as far from the usual Land Rover colours as you can get. According to my teenagers, this colour is cool and looks good on a sports car. All I can say is that if you drove a car that colour and you were a woman with blonde hair, folk would wonder if you were trying to emulate a certain plastic doll. If this SUV ever gets taken off-road, it won’t get lost in any landscape imaginable.
The small Swiss manufacturer Rinspeed (which sounds like it should be a washing machine brand) came up with something called the MicroMax, which looks as though a commuter bus has been put through the hot cycle and shrunk in the wash. This has no seats for anybody – you sort of lean or squat while standing up, and you strap your bike to the back and carry the pram or shopping trolley in the middle. The target market for this, apparently, is the mobile coffee machine people or possibly the ice cream vendors, as there’s plenty of room to bung in whatever you like, but the thing’s still small enough to park anywhere.
Italdesign played fast and loose with a Lamborghini to make the Parcour, named after that French sport where you run cross-city, climbing walls and hurdling park benches. It looks like an Italian luxury sports car but with the ground clearance of a bush-basher. Wonder if they’ve got Hollywood and a few chase scenes in mind.
Toyota came up with the i-Road concept, which can’t make up its mind whether it’s a motorbike or a car. It’s got two wheels at the front and one at the back, is completely enclosed and seats one. Whether this is a good and practical idea, or whether it defeats the whole purpose of riding a motorbike or driving in a car is debateable. It could catch on – we’ll have to wait and see.
Of course, there were plenty of great new cars unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show, but more on those later!
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