It’s amazing how you look back in time and you realise how quickly it passed by. Feels like just yesterday when every motoring enthusiast was looking forward to Auto Expo 2016 with bated breath and in the blink of an eye it’s already been a week since it happened!
The anticipation levels are quite understandable too – this is India’s biggest automotive event after all, and it comes by only once every two years. This isn’t just the biggest gathering of pretty much every manufacturer in the country but it’s a great time for us journos to get together and compare notes as well.
So, coming into the Auto Expo the first concern was obviously the lack of some big names from the show itself but Royal Enfield and Bajaj Auto played that one quite sweetly with pre-Expo announcements on the Himalayan (which just seems so tempting!) and the V150 respectively.
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During the Expo though, there were barely any real launches.
It would do good if everyone aligned themselves to what a launch is and the stuff that makes it so different from an unveil or a showcase. A launch, to us, is simple – manufacturer shows car to the media, announces its price and opens sales channels to buyers.
Most of the cars and bikes that were shown at the Auto Expo were mainly what should be called as unveils or showcases – this is when a vehicle is shown to the public for the first time, without any mention of the price.
These kinds of vehicles are either purely for display intentions (like most of the exotics), concept cars or coming soon. If literary prowess was regarded as religion in this country then counting all of the unveils that happened at Auto Expo 2016 to come up with an absurd statement of ‘108 launches’ would be considered a crime.
All that is, is plain and simple PR speak and nothing else.
Even with the puny amount of launches that happened at Auto Expo 2016, I really don’t think there should be any reason to complain – Motor Shows are extremely busy venues. Yes, there are loads of people whose attention you may end up grabbing, but when you’re moving about in a massive sea of humans in a confined space, attention spans are very short.
Moreover, proper launches tend to end up being lost in the commotion of 25 press conferences back-to-back for the Journalists too. Sum all that up and you’ll understand that it doesn’t make too much sense for manufacturers to have too many real launches lined up during the Auto Expo. It’s just more beneficial to launch vehicles separately when you have the undivided attention of all the media persons at the event.
Here’s a simple test you should take if you’re someone complaining about the dearth of launches at Auto Expo 2016. Sit down, take a deep breath and close your eyes. Now, without opening your eyes, list out all the new vehicles that were displayed across all the brands at Auto Expo 2016.
You can’t, can you? Right, ‘coz there’s too many of them. Good. So stop complaining! The manufacturers know what they’re doing (in most cases at least). Launches, or no launches – Auto Expo 2016 showed some new cars and bikes coming our way over the next two years – which is exactly what it was conceived to do!
(Muntaser Mirkar is one of India’s renowned automotive journalists and the Co-Founder of MotorScribes. He can be reached on Twitter: @Bullspeech)
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