Editor’s letter: Will Geneva motor show return to form in 2024?

Bosses confirmed last week that the event will return following years if uncertainty

Europe’s largest motoring event returns next year after a five-year absence

The Geneva motor show has historically been the biggest and the best motor show in the world. In 2024, it will return for the first time in five years with a very different look and feel - both on the show floor and behind the scenes. 

For much of the past four years, there has been doubt about whether Geneva would ever return. The last-minute cancellation of the show in 2020 as the pandemic rolled into Europe was enacted in circumstances that left a bitter taste in the mouth of car makers.

Simply, they didn’t get their money back, the venue hosting the show citing ‘force majeure’ (a phrase we all got to know well from March 2020) as the reason, after the Swiss government had ruled that the show couldn't go ahead on public-health grounds. 

The show is run by a not-for-profit foundation, but back then, the make-up of the committee running it included those who were working for the venue. Vested interest, much? 

Things have changed since. Now the committee is made up of independent members, including representatives of the Swiss automotive industry’s trade body. In the pre-pandemic days, the show actually had only one employee, the managing director, such was the influence of the venue on its running and organisation; but now there's a proper team, employed by the committee to run the show and working only for the show. The relationship with the venue is now that of a contractor: it supplies the halls and the committee pays for them.

Heading the Geneva show is CEO Sandro Mesquita, who took up his position just two months after the 2020 show was cancelled. To say his job has been a difficult one would be putting it mildly, yet after several aborted attempts to get the show back up and running, it will now return. 

Shows in 2021 and 2022 were non-starters because of the ongoing pandemic; and in 2023, the global economic environment was cited as a reason to not go ahead yet again, as it seemed there simply weren't enough car makers willing to spend the money to attend. All the while, the 2020 cancellation and what happened – or rather didn’t happen – next loomed large. 

Mesquita says what has changed for 2024 is an unanimous mandate from the foundation’s committee to go ahead with the show off the back of manufacturer support. These include not only big manufacturers and niche brands but also Chinese car makers, which has probably provided the tipping point between making the show viable or not. 

The presence of Chinese brands has bulked out the Paris and Munich motor shows over the previous two autumns, and the extra cachet and historical significance of Geneva should bring yet more to Switzerland next February. Unlike Paris and Munich, Geneva will stay very much as a car show rather than a mobility one.

While we’re delighted that it’s back (what better place to meet so many industry colleagues and get a feel for the mood and trends of the industry in one place?), let’s not pretend that the Geneva show will be as big as it was, at least in 2024.

Like all shows, it was on the decline before the pandemic as car makers chose to spend marketing budgets elsewhere.

Motor shows are expensive places to be anyway, Geneva notoriously more so, with the local hotels raising prices and in many cases insisting on week-long bookings, even if you were only there for a single-night business trip.

However, Mesquita insists that costs will be lower, including charges for stands themselves and by a reduction of the length of the show from 10 to seven days. There’s no word yet on whether the hotels have got the memo. 

Those car makers who will return from 2020 will do so with no prospect of getting their money back on that aborted show. When the show’s attendance list is confirmed, it will be fascinating to see for whom time has healed old wounds, yet no more fascinating than whether or not the show itself will be a success and whether it can be the biggest and best motor show in the world once more.