Urban Toronto's own (but rarely seen anymore) Shawn Micalef ways in about the autoshow...
Fiddling amid the rising flames
The Canadian International AutoShow has all the car culture you could want under three roofs but what’s not there might be the most remarkable part
BY Shawn Micallef February 20, 2008 14:02
So many jobs around here, directly and indirectly, depend on the car industry that if you live in Southern Ontario, taking a trip to the Canadian International AutoShow can be like going to a giant indoor company picnic. This was even more true where I grew up. Down in Windsor in the ’80s and ’90s, the yearly trip to the Detroit Autoshow was a very big deal. Many of our parents worked at one of the Big Three, our straight teeth — known as the “Buzz Hargrove Smile†— were the result of generous benefit packages, and deep employee discounts meant the cars viewed at the show would likely end up in our driveways.
The irresistible lure of $20- to $30-an-hour jobs at the factories kept many Windsor kids out of university and got them into home-ownership before age 25. The AutoShow was the shiny Oscar-like event that represented it all.
Moving to Toronto meant giving up a lifestyle where I drove at least 50km every day, zigzagging around the city in a car that I nearly lived in. Now I edit a magazine (Spacing) devoted to all things antithetical to car culture; I make part of my living writing about pedestrian activities; I will, sometimes, ride a bike across the city in rain or snow. Though the shift was welcome and liberating, the change is radical.
The Toronto show opened last Friday (it runs until Feb. 24), just days after General Motors announced a record-breaking US$38.7 billion in losses this past year. This announcement, coupled with the car increasingly being vilified by urban planners, peak oil crusaders and environmentalists (all of whom suggest at various degrees of amplification that the end is nigh for the automobile) had me wondering if the AutoShow still beats the drum of oblivious and happy progress that it did the last time I attended a show, sometime during the late-Mulroney era.
The sheer size of the show in Toronto is incredible. Filling both the massive north and south halls of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the show even spreads to the playing field of the Rogers Centre. Ironically the AutoShow is a massive pedestrian event. The buildings are connected by a series of temporary tent-like heated tunnels, though those who want the full automotive experience can take a shuttle bus between buildings. My consort and I wandered through at a good pace and it still took us over three hours to see most of it.
The giant exhibition rooms are carpeted with new, plush pile. Shuffling along acres of it, the multi-coloured astroturf supercharges your body with static electricity causing a shock every time a metal vehicle is touched, like a small physical manifestation of the guilt Al Gore’s film might have given us.
Where there isn’t carpet, there are raised hardwood or plastic floors. It is, in effect, a series of stage sets, each company creating a completely different environment. There are entire ceilings and lighting rigs hung from dozens of cables from the roof of the closed Rogers Centre, making it easy to forget you’re even in the stadium.
At the Chrysler exhibit, a spokesmodel with an unmistakable Michigan twang said the new Town & Country minivan is the cure to the “are we there yet syndrome,†suggesting it was the right “dosage.†A group of teenage guys in spiky emo belts and saggy pants asked her about safety features but their glances at each other when she turned around betrayed their interest was in something other than sensible driving.
Near the south entrance there’s a rabbit-petting zoo, where they have “live rabbits for the little ones†and, cleverly slipped in, “a 170-horsepower Volkswagen Rabbit for the big kids.†The rabbit attendant told us the animals are rescues from the Newmarket SPCA, a “little stressed†because it was the first day of the show.
Whenever you stand in front of a car, from Lamborghini to Buick, you can just about feel the heat of the flashbulbs on your neck. Everybody is car paparazzi. It’s hard to tell which are the more popular sex objects for the men and their cameras: the cars, or the Mitsubishi girls clomping around in stilettos and miniskirts.
Over at the General Motors exhibit, we were approached by a fresh-faced employee — too young with too moddish a haircut to be a car salesman — who asked if we were looking to buy a GM product soon. When I said absolutely not, he managed to get me to sign up on their computer for “pre-approved†credit by being nice and suggesting it would be silly to pass up this special AutoShow offer. Within an hour I received an email from GM telling me I was pre-approved (do they ever just plain approve people anymore?), and the next day I got two personal phone calls and an email from a salesman at the closest GM dealership to my home, telling me he has a few of the Saturns I’m interested in waiting on the lot for me. Perhaps this is the first manifestation of auto-desperation in the dying days (maybe decades) of the industry. Or maybe it’s just the usual soft-and-hard sell. But I feel like I’ve set in motion a chain of events that I may not be able to stop until I’m in the driver’s seat of a new car.
After an hour, the show becomes a blur and the cars begin to look the same and the pitches all sound alike. At that point, the peripheral stuff becomes more interesting, like the Canadian Forces handing out camouflaged rubber bracelets and silver dog tags.
On the floor of the Rogers Centre, the Toronto police have an anti-drunk-driving display that includes graphic pictures of car crashes that list the ages of the people who died. Being a bit of a downer at a place where nobody wants to think about the mangled death car ownership risks, the police are hidden behind a curtain where the Blue Jays’ bullpen usually is.
Up above in the concourse behind the grandstands, the peripheral street-racing industry shows off everything you need to outfit your Honda Civic for late-night drag races down suburban roads like Sheppard or Pharmacy. These range from “Hustler†decals, chrome “mag-wheels,†subwoofers that fill entire backseats and various spoiler, muffler and ground-effect treatments. All the things that mark a culture that has the cops down below on edge. Yet it’s all there under a few giant roofs.
The cognitive dissonance is unremarkable because the only thing the AutoShow seems to be missing is a sense of awareness of the dangers and problems the products pose. There are a few panel displays called “GTA in Motion†tucked in behind an escalator, where new smart-car technology is exhibited and a suggestion is forwarded that the auto industry has a responsibility to “unlock†the gridlock problem on our roads. Yet for an event billed as “Turning Point: New directions, New technologies, New excitement,†the show is, overwhelmingly, business as usual.
We bought into the promise of postwar car culture, but for the vast population of the GTA who are shackled to their cars, by choice or by circumstance, a Hybrid SUV isn’t going to help unclog the roads or take the kids to hockey when gas is priced out of reach of the average family. Though it is immense, the biggest thing at the AutoShow might be the elephant in the room — but like on the Titanic, the band keeps playing on and you would never know the water is rising fast.
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