I’m told my fascination with cars began when I instantly adopted my brother’s collection of toys as a young toddler. To the rest of my family, a car was merely ‘a tool to get from A to B’, and in fact I was at school by the time we had one of our own. Nonetheless, for me, cars were everything, and as such my childhood is peppered with car-related memories.
I can still pinpoint the exact spot on the street I grew up on where I saw our first car, a Citroën ZX, for the first time. For our second car, this time a Citroën Xantia, I can remember not just where I was on Jesus Green in Cambridge when I saw my dad drive up the road, but I can also still feel the heat of that August evening and the unmistakeable new car smell that was emanating out of the windows (all-round electric windows being a novel feature of this car for us).
“For me, cars were everything, and as such my childhood is peppered with car-related memories.”
Or there’s the time in 1994 when I saw two brand-new BMW E36 M3 convertibles in a car park beneath Helvellyn in the Lake District, which is imprinted so indelibly on my memory that I can still tell you one was Atlantis blue and the other Dakar yellow.
By the time my parents were looking to buy our next car, me not yet a teenager, I was actively involved in drawing up the shortlist – poring over brochures and reviews, and dragging my parents along to various dealerships for test drives.
This was an era where I would mostly get my fix nagging my parents to get the latest car magazine, the occasional TV programme, and by carefully studying everything happening on the roads around me. Perhaps the most immersive experiences for me came every other year, when my aunt and uncle would take me to Birmingham’s NEC for the British International Motor Show.
International motor shows were once the cornerstone events of the automotive industry: a place where car manufacturers showcased concepts, unveiled their newest production models and demonstrated the latest technology to press, industry professionals and enthusiasts.
For someone like me, for whom getting a driving license was still a way off, it was an exciting opportunity to engage with car makers’ full ranges in the flesh. The entire experience was tactile. I wasn’t just able to walk around and study the smallest details of dozens of cars, but I could open the doors and get in too. I would take away not only memories that would allow me to imagine myself behind the wheel for months after, but also stacks of physical brochures I could return to and re-examine.
When I spent time with the car companies’ representatives, I usually felt a bit of a fraud knowing I wasn’t about to buy a car of my own – but in hindsight I realise I was already influencing others’ buying decisions, and these experiences undoubtedly created lasting affinities with brands that have stuck with me, now that I have my own purchasing power.
“The most immersive experiences for me came every other year, when my aunt and uncle would take me to Birmingham’s NEC for the British International Motor Show.”
The British motor show was first held in 1903 at Crystal Palace, later moving to Olympia and then Earl’s Court. Its attendance peaked at just over 900,000 visitors soon after it moved to the NEC in the late 70s. By the time I was going, through the 90s and into the early 2000s, though it always felt bustling to me, in reality the British offering was already in decline.
It was an expensive operation for car makers and, particularly as UK manufacturing was also in decline, other European motor shows like Geneva, Frankfurt and Paris were much more dominant – some still attracting record visitor levels as recently as a decade ago. More recently, as in so many spheres, Beijing has become a key hub.
Last year, Auto China 2024 played host to almost 120 new model premieres, 40 of which were from multinational, rather than Chinese, brands. In 2012, Lamborghini – the Italian manufacturer owned by Audi, itself part of the Volkswagen Audi Group – unveiled the concept for its first-ever SUV, the Urus, not in Italy or Germany, but at the Beijing show, and it also launched the latest generation of it – the company’s first plug-in hybrid – there in 2024.
That said, the concept of the international motor show simply doesn’t dominate the car industry as it once did, with the Covid-19 pandemic only accelerating that trend.
Perhaps more interestingly then, BMW announced its latest big development this week not at a traditional motor show, but at CES – the annual Consumer Electronics Show – in Las Vegas. And the announcement was not a new car, but instead the brand’s latest user interface, Operating System X, in a presentation more akin to an Apple update in Cupertino.
It’s a clear mark of where the automotive industry is today. Modern cars are as much about software as they are hardware. As McKinsey’s road map for Europe’s automotive industry points out, ‘modern vehicles may have as many as 150 control units in a distributed software architecture’, while their analysis shows that ‘EV consumers are more than twice as likely to switch brands for better in-vehicle technology, such as advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) features and connectivity services’.
It should therefore come as no surprise that, as Yahoo! Finance’s Pras Subramanian puts it, ‘autos stole the show’ at CES 2025.
As someone who is both passionate about cars and used to queue up to buy early iPhones on launch days, I can definitely get excited about new car technology. But as I look at the road ahead, as an enthusiast and customer, I do wonder whether engaging with our cars primarily through screens and apps can ever create the same emotional connection with a car.
For most people, most of the time, it is more convenient to have an automatic gearbox or none; to be able to start a car at the press of a button; and to open the windows electronically. But to shift a gearstick from second to third, to find the biting point with your left foot, to turn a key in the ignition, or even to wind the window down with a rotating lever arm… these were all acts that created a relationship between driver (or passenger).
Twenty-five years ago, I was probably aware of every mainstream car model that was available in the UK, kept informed fairly modestly by magazines, a bit of TV and dialing up the early internet.
Today, I find myself coming across models I’ve never heard of regularly. Is that because of information overload, or have I lost interest? Maybe, but I fear that, for a host of reasons, many modern cars have lost some of the kind of character, the individuality, perhaps even the soul, that I used to seek out at the motor show. How often do you get in the back of an Uber and know what make or model of a car you’re in?
It would be easy to assume that in-car technology is a good way to attract future generations of consumers, but I’m not convinced that tells the full story. According to research, around one in twelve classic car owners in the UK is under 30 now, and the number of young drivers purchasing classic car insurance grew by 16% in 2024, fuelled in part by TikTok and YouTube influencers.
Car companies are in the midst of a very difficult period. Challenges including the transition to zero emissions, increased regulation, complex global supply chains impacted by increasingly unpredictable geopolitics, looming tariff threats and so on are especially problematic for an industry that depends upon long, and very expensive, R&D programmes.
But to my mind, as the industry continues to innovate, perhaps the biggest challenge it faces today is one being grappled with right across the consumer sectors: how do you continue to embrace the benefits that technology can bring, while also ensuring that you create magic and theatre, and retain the multi-sensory product and buying experience that forges relationships with customers? Ultimately, how can you ensure you inspire and create connections with future generations of the kind I grew up with? Only time will tell.
