An auto show, like any trade show, is an assertion of hierarchy. It was obvious from the press days I attended in March that Buick — once a glorious American enterprise, more recently a middling brand with a Tiger Woods endorsement deal — is at the bottom. Like visitors to a car dealership subjected to none of the sales pressure, auto show attendees can take all the time they want examining, entering, photographing, filming, touching, and slamming the doors of the contemporary American automobile. I sat down inside the Envista and considered the market potential of a cheap-feeling crossover with the rear-seat headroom of a coupe; it struck me as limited. I had gotten the sense, walking around the Javits, that after a decade of unquestioned SUV dominance we were now in the early days of decrossoverification: small and small-adjacent SUVs seemed to be getting lower, more compact, and more sedanlike than their recent antecedents. Unlike the Envista, however, most of them were managing this transition without forcing rear-seat occupants to lean forward like visitors in a hospital waiting room, waiting to be told the bad news. Buick’s old-school crappy display featured piles of branded cowboy hats and nothing at all in the way of persuasion. “Is this the company’s first compact crossover?” I found myself asking the lone and passive sales rep with a curiosity at once feigned and totally sincere. What was I, undercover for CNET? That was a real low point for me.
Auto shows used to be major media events. Local and national TV networks still show up to deliver low-energy live coverage, but the automotive magazines have thinned out and newspaper car critics are an endangered species. In their absence an esoteric community of amateurs has stepped in: TikTokers, vloggers, n+1 editors. Watching the vloggers at work called to mind firefighters rescuing a single cat from a tree or PACs spending millions of dollars on a local election — instances where effort and outcome are irrevocably mismatched. Here were guys who had spent thousands on high-end cameras and microphones to record videos that would get them views in the single digits. At one point I saw a young man sprint across the floor and instinctively thought he was a mass shooter until I noticed the selfie stick. He was a vlogger, booking it toward a Toyota Land Cruiser with his camera and proceeding to bob up and down dramatically around the hood, I guess for cinematographic reasons. It was a poignant, committed performance, and there was no way anyone would watch it once it was uploaded to YouTube.
My sentient life has roughly coincided with an era of unprecedentedly high automotive quality. In the 1990s, during my early auto show–going days, the xenophobic Reagan-era freakout about Japanese imports was giving way to a near-universal great leap forward. American cars were getting better, as were German cars and Korean cars, while the Japanese econoboxes had attained an exalted realm that seemed to surpass mere questions of reliability. Today, cars are better than they have ever been — and, not unrelatedly, are more similar to one another. There are fewer major car companies, more shared parts and platforms, a stronger regulatory environment, and far less eccentricity. None of this is bad per se, but I wonder if the oft-noted decline of auto enthusiasm isn’t in large part a consequence of our high-quality epoch. It seems to me that there is an essential relationship between idiosyncrasy and fandom — the latter can’t function without the former. Fans of midcentury English cars bonded over their MGs’ and TVRs’ ghastly wiring problems and frequent breakdowns, and turn-of-the-millennium Saturn nerds had whatever it was they had at their epic gatherings in Spring Hill, Tennessee. (...)
Acura is Honda’s luxury vehicle division, a category I’ve always been suspicious of. What’s the point of paying a huge premium for a rebadged Toyota Camry with leather seats and wood trim? Without BMW, Mercedes, and Stellantis’s numerous brands, the Japanese luxury divisions had way too much space and not enough to fill it with. My main impression of their display areas was that there was a lot of carpeting, which didn’t do much to soften the Javits’s blunt-force concrete hostility. Infiniti, the upmarket Nissan, was a little more impressive than Acura or Lexus, giving over the entirety of its floor space to a semi-interactive experience dedicated to its new QX80, a beastly full-size SUV with air curtains larger than my head. The Infiniti stand featured swelling electronic strings, blue-green lava lamp illumination, elusive hors d’oeuvres, and a weird audio component showcasing the Infiniti’s Klipsch Reference Premiere Audio System — all of which seemed like the appropriate amount of effort needed to sell an SUV that costs $30,000 more than the nearly identical Nissan Armada.
Of course there’s no inherent relationship between display quality and market share. Tesla is no less powerful for not showing up, and even Matthew McConaughey couldn’t have helped Buick make its case. But if some of the heavy hitters asserted their presence via absence, a few brands did so via emphatic presence. Toyota had wheelchair basketball and a bouncy castle meant to evoke a swimming pool in honor of the company’s Paralympic and Olympic partnerships. The row of sneakers at the Nissan stand was there to promote the Kicks compact crossover, a car named after shoes and possibly also designed to resemble them. (...)
My sentient life has roughly coincided with an era of unprecedentedly high automotive quality. In the 1990s, during my early auto show–going days, the xenophobic Reagan-era freakout about Japanese imports was giving way to a near-universal great leap forward. American cars were getting better, as were German cars and Korean cars, while the Japanese econoboxes had attained an exalted realm that seemed to surpass mere questions of reliability. Today, cars are better than they have ever been — and, not unrelatedly, are more similar to one another. There are fewer major car companies, more shared parts and platforms, a stronger regulatory environment, and far less eccentricity. None of this is bad per se, but I wonder if the oft-noted decline of auto enthusiasm isn’t in large part a consequence of our high-quality epoch. It seems to me that there is an essential relationship between idiosyncrasy and fandom — the latter can’t function without the former. Fans of midcentury English cars bonded over their MGs’ and TVRs’ ghastly wiring problems and frequent breakdowns, and turn-of-the-millennium Saturn nerds had whatever it was they had at their epic gatherings in Spring Hill, Tennessee. (...)
Acura is Honda’s luxury vehicle division, a category I’ve always been suspicious of. What’s the point of paying a huge premium for a rebadged Toyota Camry with leather seats and wood trim? Without BMW, Mercedes, and Stellantis’s numerous brands, the Japanese luxury divisions had way too much space and not enough to fill it with. My main impression of their display areas was that there was a lot of carpeting, which didn’t do much to soften the Javits’s blunt-force concrete hostility. Infiniti, the upmarket Nissan, was a little more impressive than Acura or Lexus, giving over the entirety of its floor space to a semi-interactive experience dedicated to its new QX80, a beastly full-size SUV with air curtains larger than my head. The Infiniti stand featured swelling electronic strings, blue-green lava lamp illumination, elusive hors d’oeuvres, and a weird audio component showcasing the Infiniti’s Klipsch Reference Premiere Audio System — all of which seemed like the appropriate amount of effort needed to sell an SUV that costs $30,000 more than the nearly identical Nissan Armada.
Of course there’s no inherent relationship between display quality and market share. Tesla is no less powerful for not showing up, and even Matthew McConaughey couldn’t have helped Buick make its case. But if some of the heavy hitters asserted their presence via absence, a few brands did so via emphatic presence. Toyota had wheelchair basketball and a bouncy castle meant to evoke a swimming pool in honor of the company’s Paralympic and Olympic partnerships. The row of sneakers at the Nissan stand was there to promote the Kicks compact crossover, a car named after shoes and possibly also designed to resemble them. (...)
The bestselling automotive brands in America are Toyota, Ford, and Chevrolet. In 2023, the bestselling models were the Ford F-Series, the Chevy Silverado, the Ram Pickup, the Toyota RAV4, and the Tesla Model Y. The stars of the New York International Auto Show, however, were the Koreans. While Genesis held it down for the Korean luxury sector, Kia did its best as Hyundai’s somewhat lesser quasi subsidiary. Introducing its heroically ugly K4, the Kia representative talked at length about the model’s various technological innovations, including its AI capability, which allows drivers to hear about their “stocks, sports scores, and owner’s manual content.” Over and over again I heard about the width of various digital instrumental panels, possibly the saddest example of dick measuring I’ve encountered in an industry permanently committed to the practice. (The K4’s screen is thirty inches wide, if Big Display Energy is the sort of thing that gets you going.) (...)
The salespersonship at the Hyundai press conference was impressive. Introducing two lesser new models, Randy Parker, the CEO of the company’s American division, announced Hyundai’s “all-new human-centric technology”: the “return of some of those knobs and dials” that nearly every brand — other than the noble anti-touchscreen holdout Mazda — has renounced over the past few years. But these surface-level tweaks weren’t the big story. “We’re meeting customers where they are on the journey to electrification,” Parker said with great pride. If in recent years electric cars had appealed to a smallish number of early adopters, Hyundai is now working toward “what we call the early majority,” a brilliant piece of branding that feels like something Democratic consultants get paid millions of dollars to (fail to) come up with. (...)
During the Hyundai press conference discussion of Hyundai Pay, a technology that places the brand “at the nexus of the auto industry, the payments industry, and the EV charging industry,” I had the thought that the interior of a new car is the only place where one can experience the total tech dream as it’s been conceived of by its proselytizers. While driving you can turn your Klipsch Reference Premiere Audio System all the way up, suppress the outside world, and attain pure, blissful dissociation — unless a bridge collapses under you, or (more likely) you get distracted by a text and crash into a minivan.
by Mark Krotov, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Still from Trafic
