[Auto] Detroit's cancelled auto show will become an outdoor auto extravaganza

[_Happy boy]

After rescheduling the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit for 2020, cancelling it, and then scheduling it again, organizers have now announced that it won’t be held in 2021 after all.

Instead, an all-outdoor show called Motor Bella is being promised as its replacement in September 2021. It’ll be held in Pontiac, Michigan, about 50 km away from downtown Detroit.

Dating back more than a century, the NAIAS was always the first auto show of the season, held early in January. More recently, it faced increasingly fierce competition from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), also held early in the year in Las Vegas, which was becoming more attractive to many automakers as a venue to introduce their new models — and which went digital-only this year due to the pandemic.

The Detroit show was held in January 2019 in Cobo Hall as usual, but without participation from such automakers as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche, Volvo, and others. The plan was to then move the 2020 show to June to avoid a head-to-head with CES, but that was cancelled when Cobo Hall was transformed into a field hospital in case extra beds were needed for COVID-19 patients. That show was then rescheduled for June 2021, and has now been cancelled.

Motor Bella was originally conceived as a show for British and Italian supercars and vintage vehicles that would debut at the NAIAS in June 2020. It’s now the replacement for the entire event, and organizers are promising vehicle debuts, track and off-road demonstrations, mobility tech displays, and autonomous vehicles, all outdoors to address “continued COVID-19 concerns about indoor events.” The show will be held September 21 to 26, 2021.

In a release, organizers added that auto shows are adapting to pandemic restrictions worldwide, and that “NAIAS has been reimagining its position for some time.” Conventional auto shows overall haven’t yet been declared officially dead yet, as some have been warning, but it sounds like what was once the most traditional and best-known show of them all is never going to go back to the way it was.