Los Angeles Auto Show Heralds Uncertain but Hopeful New Year
By Bill Visnic November 16, 2010There is much hopeful and upbeat as the Los Angeles auto show opens to the media today.
Automakers are making an increasingly credible collective effort to open a new era of advanced, more-efficient and more environmentally friendly personal mobility. There's a growing sense such a transformation might even evolve into profitable business. And, of course, there's the rebound - so far a stunted, jerky one, but 2010 will be kinder to the auto industry than was 2009.
Many automakers, however, still are licking wounds from the protracted recession, the battle for market share is more cutthroat than ever and although General Motors Co. is set to return to public ownership tomorrow and many other makers are unexpectedly healthy, too, the stock market continues its nervous ways, nobody's certain consumers will return to showrooms with gusto next year - nd nobody's certain that when customers do buy, they'll be ready to embrace more-expensive, less-big vehicles when gasoline prices remain as depressed as the economy.
Such is the backdrop for the growing-in-stature Los Angeles show, where the industry's enlarging environmental focus plays directly into the show's longstanding niche. So the 2010 version of the Left Coast's most major auto show will be little different, where flaunting MPG definitely is hipper than peddling HP.
General Motors will be jousting with the financial press all week as its initial public offering goes live on Thursday, but its most in-theme product play for the LA show is a recall of its mild-hybrid technology to boost its Buick LaCrosse to a heady 37 miles-per-gallon rating for the highway.
Cadillac is showing up with the slightly strange, scissor-doored Urban Luxury Concept. There's also the unveiling of the Camaro convertible and a hot-rodded Buick Regal, the GS, although it's not as hot as Buick originally led us to believe.
In addition to more regular wares, Mercedes-Benz is featuring a supremely futuristic concept, the Biome, that in addition to wearing fiber-based cloth bodywork and weighing 875 pounds, it "could" run on a weirdo chemical fuel and emit - get ready for it - oxygen.
Ford Motor Co. is once again showing the 2012 Focus but now able to tout a projected 40-mpg highway number from the car's direct-injected, 148-horsepower 2-liter 4-cylinder.
A raft of concept and production electric vehicles is on tap for the Los Angeles show, including the U.S.-market version of Mitsubishi Motor Corp.'s widely-known i MiEV sedan, which, like many of the early EVs, isn't the cutest duck on the pond. Honda Motor Co. Ltd., which has been glaringly silent on the EV front, was expected to present a battery-powered concept car and Toyota will unveil the RAV4 EV, the first fruit of its relationship with - and $50-million investment in - silicon-valley darling Tesla Motors.
Heck, even never-cared-about-thirst Land Rover's Range Rover is joining in, showing the 4-door version of its Evoque, a new-age "soft-roader" that almost completely eschews the brand's go-anywhere heritage.
The gorgeously sharky Evoque will be offered with front-wheel drive and is being openly billed for pavement-only purposes to support the notion Rangie has a new respect for the environment its vehicles forever have been designed to crush under their tires. Oh, the off-road Terrain Response system is there, but this thing's unquestionably a crossover, not an SUV.
Yep, the times they are a-changin'.
Photos by manufacturers
1. Mercedes-Benz Biome concept car: natural-chemical fuel, oxygen emissions
2. Cadillac Urban Luxury Concept
3. Mitsubishi i MiEV in U.S.-spec form
4. Range Rover Evoque
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