This year’s Geneva Motor Show will be a shadow of its former self

When it came to European motor shows, it was always Geneva that was up there with the best.

Almost every major global car manufacturer attended, big and small, and it hosted a range of new reveals, from supercars to city cars. If a car firm didn’t attend, eyebrows were raised.

But 2020 threw all of this up in the air, with Geneva Motor Show organisers forced to cancel the event at the last second because of the spread of the coronavirus, despite many firms’ cars already being on show stands or in shipping. It was a nightmare situation.

Since then, organisers have tried and failed to bring it back, but on February 26, the doors to the huge Palexpo exhibition centre will open once again for the Geneva Motor Show for the first time in five years.

Organisers of the event are pretty open about the fact that it won’t be the same, with Sandro Mesquita, the show’s chief executive, telling Car Dealer it was ‘clear that the 2024 edition is more compact’.

Mesquita said: ‘It’s not just another edition. Because we had a four-year pause, Covid has accelerated some changes.

While organisers boast of ‘more than 20 major exhibitors’, when you delve into the list, there are only a handful of household names, including Dacia, MG and Renault. We’ll explore more later about who is and who isn’t there, but it’s a stark change.

Alexandre de Senarclens is chairman of the new event and calls it an ‘entrepreneur venture’, saying that ‘more and more brands will come’ each year after seeing the 2024 edition.

‘We are entrepreneurs in the sense we want our venture to grow. Of course, we want more brands to come because we want to be the centre of this industry.

‘Our goal is to demonstrate that we are the place to be, as our concept is good, and in 2025 we will have 10 more brands and be as big as we were before Covid.’

Although the organisers are hoping for 200,000 people to attend the show in 2024, it’s a long way off the 600,000 that visited in 2019.

As journalists, there isn’t enough meat on the bone to warrant our time and expense of going to this year’s event, though.

It will likely be an ongoing challenge; manufacturers won’t attend if there isn’t footfall, and the public won’t attend