Beautiful Bologna Fails To Attract An Automotive Audience

Beautiful Bologna Fails To Attract An Automotive Audience

Beautiful Bologna Fails To Attract An Automotive Audience

Geoff Maxted
DriveWrite
November 16, 2013

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the home of such legendary names as Ferrari and Maserati and Silvio Berlusconi would have a halfway decent motor show but this is not the case. In fact, this year‘s only Italian show, scheduled to be held in the beautiful city of Bologna (pictured below), was cancelled due to a lack of exhibitors in a moribund local market. Presumably some other manufacturers were unwilling to foist their dowdy products on the country that bought us the 458. So next year the event will run from December 11-21, 2014 - just in time for Christmas - in the not so beautiful city of Milan.

"We want to give the automotive industry a springboard that can compete with the big European car shows," said the chief executive of the Fiera Milano, the proposed show venue.

The Bologna Motor Show was planned to take place from December 3-9th. However, with Italy's domestic car sales having fallen fifty percent since 2007, carmakers have little incentive to spend the money to show new products to a public that's not buying.

Car companies spend at least one million Euros per brand on a stand at a major international car show such as the ones held in Detroit, Paris, Geneva and Frankfurt. Audi was reported to have spent 40 million Euros to deck out its stand and other locations at the Frankfurt Motor Show which had 1,000 exhibitors, whereas Bologna last year had 133.

The Milan show will be organized by Promotor, the same group that ran - or rather didn’t run - the Bologna event. An optimistic Promotor Chairman said last Friday, "We will start to contact potential exhibitors today. Right now we aren't able to say how many we will have.” he’ll have to ring around though. They are all setting up in Los Angeles and Tokyo. So many shows - not enough time.