Carscribe: Motor Trader checks out plans for the new British Motor Show

This is a monumental year in the history of our country, as the clock ticking past 11pm on 31 January has already signified.

Although it’s hardly on the same seismic scale, 20 August marks another moment of national revival. It is the date of the return, after a 12-year gap, of a British Motor Show.

For more than a decade it has rankled that Britain, with its healthy indigenous motor industry, has not been able to sustain its own national auto show, when others around the world have continued to flourish.

That includes Switzerland, where the Geneva Motor Show somewhat bizarrely ranks as one of the big five elite autos shows around the world, despite the country’s distinct lack of car production.The other four big ones are in Germany, France, Japan and the US.

The first motor show in Edwardian Britain in 1903 was at Crystal Palace. The following year it moved to Olympia, where it stayed until 1936. Next came 40 years of motor shows at Earls Court, then it shifted north to the NEC in Birmingham from 1978 to 2004, before a couple of dwindling events at London’s ExCel saw it finally run out of fuel and driven off the road in 2008. Since then an attempt to revive it as the London Motor Show, first at Battersea Park and then back to the ExCel, has been largely ignored by motor manufacturers, although helpfully supported by local dealers.

So what hope is there for the new British Motor Show, due to be staged for the first time for just four days in August, and located away from the capital at Farnborough airport? Can it hope to revive a credible auto exhibition that will attract car makers as well as dealers, and also pull in the punters?

That’s the hope of the man steering it as the show’s chief executive Andy Entwistle. He is working on plans for an active as well as static event, and has enlisted Paul Swift, the talent behind the Top Gear Live stunt show, as technical director. Entwistle is currently in negotiations with some leading industry marques to engage their interest in supporting the show, but he has an uphill battle ahead.

Not least is the problem of the steady decline of other motor shows internationally. Last year’s Geneva and Frankfurt Motor Shows were as notable for the major motor manufacturers who were missing from the show halls as for those who attended. Paris had the same problem two years ago, with yawning gaps in under-populated halls. Car makers are turning their backs on mega expensive show stands, costing millions that they believe can be better spent engaging potential buyers elsewhere.  There is also the difficult issue that millennials are notoriously less engaged with the motor car than previous generations.

He is at least on the right track in making the show affordable to attend. Unlike some of the mega-expensive entry tickets at other national auto shows, the British event will have a ticket price of £18.50, or £37 for a family of five, so children get free passage with their parents. As Entwistle rightly points out, cinema tickets can cost more than that.

There will be 40,000 square metres of indoor show space, and four acres of outdoor activities, including a 2km test track. There will be an emphasis on alternative driving experiences for those who have only ever driven petrol or diesel cars.

Visitors will have the chance to try out an electric model, hybrids, fuel cell and other alternative fuelled cars. Other plans include supercar parades, stunt driving shows, and marque-specific parades. Entwistle says that the area of the show that will feature classic cars is proving to be very popular and is already 80% full, six months ahead of opening.

He hopes a big pull will be the tech hall, focusing on cars we will all be driving in the future.

“We are aiming for a very diverse audience, including lots of people who haven’t considered driving an electric car before now. We will be addressing misconceptions, miscommunications and fear, exploring range anxiety and charge anxiety, with sessions about autonomous vehicles and what people can expect of them.”

So what is it going to cost exhibitors who sign up to be there?

Dealers can opt in to a bare two-car stand for £3,500, which works out at £100 per square metre. Fully branded, carpeted and powered, the same stand is £4,500.

A grander stand space suitable for a manufacturer’s use, fully built and ready to go, will be £19,000. That’s quite a difference from the mega-bucks expenditure car firms are increasingly shunning elsewhere.

Marketing for the show is scheduled to begin ramping up next month. So will this be the start of a new era for the British Motor Show, and is the 2020 event the first of what will become an ongoing date in the annual automotive calendar? It’s notable that the new show’s chief executive was also the brains behind the now-defunct London Motor Show, so it could be said that the new British Motor Show is merely a grander morphing of that. Will it succeed? We’ll see, but at least it is a genuine attempt to put Britain back on the annual motor show map.