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Now that the hurly-burly of the Motor Show has passed, David Wilcox reflects on some of its lasting impressions, balancing the awesome facts and figures and sales success stories with some offbeat and ironic observations
WHEN the National Exhibition Centre turnstiles had made their last revolution at the 1984 British International Motor Show they had admitted 696,183 visitors.
This is 49,294 up on the 1982 total and represents a 7.6 per cent increase, thereby reversing the decline in attendance at the previous two shows.
With three days left to run this year's figures were actually slightly down on 1982 but a big upturn in visitors on the final weekend did the trick. That seems to have been the pattern this year; quieter during the week and busier at the weekends.
The penultimate day, Saturday, was the most crowded with 99,548 visitors. Also up was the number of overseas trade visitors registering at the show; there were 5,091, around 25 per cent more than in 1982. They came from 94 countries.
More significantly, the number of visitors during the trade days was higher this year, up from 45,000 to 48,000. In the days when the Commercial Motor Show was a separate entity at Earls Court attendances for the commercial exhibitors were easier to assess. At the last commercial show at Earls Court in 1976 there were 80,000 visitors.
The organiser, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) this year made an effort to give better value for money to the exhibitors by increasing the number of trade days when much of the serious selling takes place, particularly in the commercial vehicle halls. This year there were three days instead of the usual two and the move seems to have paid dividends.
The vehicle manufacturers I contacted all reported that they had an extremely successful -show when judged in terms of serious inquiries/sales leads and firm orders. Even allowing for their natural optimism it is not often that manufacturers admit to having a bad show 1984 was good for the exhibitors.
For example, Scania said it had three times as many serious inquiries as at the last NEC show. "Incredible", said MAN-VW. "The best ever", said Roeselare Sales, the importer of Jonckheere coach bodywork, reporting that in the three trade days it sold 28 coaches, including 17 high-specification double-deckers a good indication of the direction of the coaching business.
Just before the show, in a refreshingly honest admission, ERF sales and marketing director Bryan Hunt said the company was "on the ground" in spring and that the new CPSeries was the first plank of its survival and come-back programme.
After the three trade days at the show he struck a happier note: "The level of orders across the product range has exceeded all expectations."
ERF took orders for 60 vehicles in the three days, easily justifying the company's presence. ERF's Sandbach neighbour Foden decided to give the show a miss this year and, although ERF said that it did not consider non-attendance, it did look very carefully at what accounts for a large slice of its promotional budget.
Exhibiting at the show is not cheap. There is a three-tier pricing structure for renting the stand space. The rate is £54 per square metre, plus vat, although for SMMT members it is £36 per sqm, providing the exhibitor signs an agreement that he will not attend any similar non-SMMT show in the year. If he does not want to sign away this right the NEC price goes up to £45 per sqm.
Leyland Trucks was proudly announcing that it occupied the largest stand in the entire show. It had over 2,000sqm in the centre of Hall 5 which meant a bill of well over £70,000 just for renting the space, and that does not include the stands for Freight Rover or Leyland Bus. When the cost of stand design, erection, staffing, accommodation, expense's and so on are included the total price rockets £500,000 was a much-repeated figure for Leyland's total show bill.
The company would neither confirm nor deny this, but was only too pleased to report that business was brisk for its 7.5tonne gvw Roadrunner. It was launched on September 25 and 1,000 were sold before the show opened. In the three trade days and first public day orders ... for a further 1,000 were taken, worth £12m.
It is obviously easier to sell into your home market; a Leyland representative said that the company sold 67 commercial vehicles to the chauvinistic French at the Parish Show just a couple of weeks earlier.
One of those Roadrunners has passed into Ford's hands so the company can carry out the same exercise as many operators a back-to-back comparison of Roadrunner versus 7.5-tonne Cargo.
Leyland's product engineering director Peter Capon was cock-a-hoop at NEC with Roadrunner's reception. No, he did not feel that the long-established six-cylinder 98-Series engine took the shine off the Roadrunner his biggest unfulfilled desire was to have put disc brakes on Roadrunner, not change the engine. He identified the new Mercedes-Benz as a real competitor for Roadrunner in the 7.5-tonne market.
Peter Capon also gave a slap on the back for the advertising boys. Apparently, in a prelaunch "clinic" Roadrunner was found to project a rather frail image, no doubt due to the glass panel in the front and the thin-looking seats. But, said Mr Capon, after the two-wheeling Roadrunner advertisement with its "toughest truck on two wheels" slogan this frail image has disappeared. Perhaps now the clinic thinks Roadrunner is susceptible to side-winds ...
No doubt encouraged by this two-wheeling success Leyland branched out into bicycles, hiring 15 from a shop in Stratfordupon-Avon for use by journalists who wanted to zip round the NEC more quickly on press day. It is an idea borrowed from the Amsterdam Show, but the powers-that-be at NEC did not like it; indoor cycling is too dangerous once the show has opened. NEC stewards tried to apprehend same of the bicycleborne pressmen, but those with a turn of speed managed to retain their mounts a little longer.
Leyland said the bikes were a success too and kept five of them after press day for use by stand staff during non-opening hours.
Evidently not covered by the NEC safety regulations was the lveco 220.30 6x2 twin steer tractive unit. It was entered by lveco in the bodywork and coachwork competition run by the Institute of British Carriage and Automobile Manufacturers (IBCAM) so the judges duly climbed into the cab to inspect the interior.
The cab seemed to take exception to their criticism of the dashboard. First the passenger seat sprang forward and its head restraint hit one judge in the eye. Within minutes this unprovoked attack was continued when the top bunk dropped down onto the head of a second judge, dealing him a nasty blow to the forehead. The Iveco did not win — you cannot intimidate an IBCAM judge.
It has long been a custom of some vehicle manufacturers to save up a choice order and then announce it as hot news from the motor show. Bedford had the least subtle example this year with a press release put out on the very first (press) day announcing an order by Pickfords Removals for 89 Bedford TLs. With immaculate timing the managing director of Pickfords Removals popped up to the NEC to "confirm" the order on press day. Elsewhere on the stand Bedford was showing its drag-reducing and appearanceenhancing Techliner package for the TL range. This might have confused some visitors who spotted a Techline outside the halls and who might think Bedford is trying to give the TL a 200ft long boxy shape. Closer inspection revealed that this Techline was five 40ft semitrailers docked end-to-end to form a walk-through exhibition about Ford technology.
Did you visit the display of "super trucks" in the new Hall 8? They included some of the most spectacular and unproductive lorries you are ever likely to encounter. But among them was Vavoom, a perfectly viable ERF CP38-320 4x2 tractive unit. It was finished in what ERF euphemistically described as "totally unique paintwork". The cab was a camouflage of yellow, purple, blue and white, with Vavoom painted diagonally around it.
ERF said the unit was for sale so I asked the price. "Are you serious?" said the lady on the ERF stand. The asking price was £30,900, "ready to drive away" with all its extras. In the end it was ERF which drove it away — there were no takers.
Did you find your way around the NEC by looking for the manufacturers' name banners hanging from the roof? Either side of the names were two flags and one of the more observant CM staff wondered on what basis these flags were chosen.
Some were easy — two Union Jacks for Leyland Trucks for example. But others were inconsistent. If Renault had one ,UK and one French flag, why did Peugeot-Talbot have two UK flags? And if Mercedes-Benz had one UK and one German flag, why did MAN-VW have two German flags? Perhaps we are moving towards flags of convenience in the motor industry. Maybe they will all be under the Liberian flag at the next show, If you kept your eyes nearer ground level you may have spotted some sticky tape discretely covering the bodybuilders' names on one or two of the vehicles. It was the SMMT that demanded the cover-up job; if the bodybuilders are not SMMT members the society objects to their getting a free plug on someone else's stand. But why pick on the bodybuilders — I saw no sticky tape covering the names on the tyres.
For the commercial vehicle exhibitors the trade days are naturally the most lucrative. With the public days come the tyre-kickers and the boys who are intent in carving a career in the wholesale carrier bag business. It is also the period when things go missing.
According to the stand managers with just a couple of public days left to run things have been no different this year. Top of the pops with the motor show kleptomaniacs appears to be gear lever knobs followed by fuel-filler caps, radiator caps, dipsticks, radio knobs and pedal rubbers. The strangest story came from the Mercedes-Benz stand. Somebody put superglue in the door locks of the 1625 and 1633 tractive units on display and a Mercedes salesman was actually in one of the cabs while it was being done.
Exhibitors try to counter pilferage in several ways; the sheer number of stand personnel was the simplest method. ERF, for example, arranged a commanding, all-round view of its stand through some cunning black blinds. Ford employed a security company to give an obvious presence, but even this was not enough to stop somebody jamming a working model of an engine with a fivepenny piece.
Right at the start of the show there was an example of overzealous security: on press day one of the many visiting journalists was asked by a security guard if he had permission to take notes.
Otherwise, the exhibitors accept the losses as inevitable and they are not reported to the NEC's security. It was a fairly uneventful show for NEC Security — apart from traffic and crowd control duties their main activity was dealing with a succession of lost and found inquiries, including a pet mouse that was handed in.
During the trade days a Ferrari was reported to the police as being stolen, but it turned out that it had been parked in a no-go area outside Hall 3 and towed away by NEC Security.
Inside the security suite it is like a mini-mission control, with a bank of 10 television monitors relaying pictures from 43 cameras scattered throughout the exhibition complex. They can follow people's progress as they arrive via the approach roads, park their cars and walk into and through the halls. As traffic builds up cars are diverted to the appropriate car parks; your parking area was not chosen at random.
There is space for 17,000 cars and 600 coaches at the NEC. On the busiest days these can be supplemented by overspill parking for a further 18,000 cars on remote sites up to four miles away.
Once there are around 95,000 people in the NEC — a figure that is reached only at the peak times — visitors are directed to enter the halls via specific doors so that they do not pack into the most crowded halls.
How do they judge the crowd density in each hall? By electronic beams? By measuring the increase in temperature? No, a man goes out with a piece of cardboard with a square cut out of it. Holding the card at a certain distance he counts how many people he can see through the hole and this is translated into a people per sq metre reading.
As you read this the last of the motor show stands will have been pulled down, to be replaced by those for the Furniture Show that opens in the middle of this month. It will not be quite as big as the motor show, but there will be no shortage of places to sit down.