Auto show season is about to begin in earnest throughout the US, with the Los Angeles Auto Show now officially the first big one on the national calendar, opening Friday, November 21st and running until Sunday, November 30th – and wide-open all through the Thanksgiving holiday weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Another show which opens sooner, the annual SEMA Show (Specialty Equipment Market Association) in Las Vegas, sets the stage for car and truck performance enthusiasts with exhibits of new products from about 2,000 of SEMA’s 7,000 member companies around the globe. The show (admittance to the trade, only) opens next Tuesday, November 4th (election day, so we’re voting early this year and look forward to celebrating with other Obama enthusiasts in Las Vegas that night) and runs though Friday, the 4th. More than 100,000 people attend the SEMA Show annually, making it the largest private trade show of any kind in Las Vegas. More than 1,500 new products consistently debut at the SEMA Show each year. (Photos above and below right, Dodge's Challenger with its roof removed by a Florida company and a supercharged Hemi V8 producing 560 horsepower; below left, at the 2007 LA Auto Show, Honda's hydrogen-fueled fuel cell EV FCX sedan was the star - along with Honda robot Asimo, seen above the car on the video screen - who will the Hollywood-style celebrity be this year? We'll find out in just a few more days ...).
Founded in 1963, the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) is a trade and lobbying 
association dedicated “to helping companies within the automotive specialty-equipment industry.” What used to be called “the hot rod business” has grown into what is now estimated to be a $36.7 billion industry.
Both shows will be bellwether events this year. We’ll see how much gas prices, environmental considerations and the world financial crisis effects SEMA exhibitors, and, at the LA Auto Show, see what the car-makers themselves choose to present to the public as their plans for future cars and trucks. We’ll be attending both and will report on them in this space, along with easily accessible and downloadable video from both shows.
One vehicle we’ll see at SEMA which is already getting a lot of press is a convertible version of Dodge’s 2009 Challenger, a retro throwback to Challenger cars originally produced from 1970 to 1974. This SEMA-only car is equipped with a supercharger making 560 horsepower from the car’s 6.1-liter Hemi V8 engine. A Florida-based company, Coach Builders Ltd., which claims to be “the oldest aftermarket convertible converter in the country,” is making this one-off car. While it sounds exciting, we doubt it’s the answer to America’s economic and gas price problems.
Click below for more on what's upcoming at SEMA and the LA Auto Show - And be sure to let us know what you think will be the big stories, too! And be sure to check back here for plenty of video and photo albums from both shows!
Price? An original Challenger Hemi coupe sold for a tick above $5,000 in 1970, a lot of money then and now. Today, that same car in outstanding condition can bring as much as $90,000 at auction. If Coach Builders decides to offer a consumer version of their show car, it’s estimated the price would start at around $60,000 (including the cost of the hardtop Challenger).
This might surprise some readers, but I don’t mind someone spending that much money on an exciting, powerful and interesting car like this new-age Challenger. (Photos, above, A racing version of Nissan's GTR, below in blue, Corvette's 2009 ZR1 will cost about $100K, below left, Simon Cowell exits his Bugatti Veyron somewhere in LA-LA Land, bottom right, a Hummer outfitted for the DARPA Pentagon project - winner gets a $1 million or so - seeking vehicles which can run by themselves in any terrain, and finally, a job for which a Hummer actually makes sense!).
That’s because the problems with car companies aren’t because of cars like Chevrolet’s Corvette, Ferrari’s California, Nissan’s GTR, any of BMW’s M-models, Chryslers with Hemi engines or even the $1.6 million, 1,000 horsepower Bugatti Veyron with its quad-turbocharged DOHC 64-valve W16-cylinder engine (one of which is owned by “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell).
All these cars are made in extremely limited numbers and priced too high to ever find a home in the 
average garage. They are called “halo cars,” produced in small numbers and built to bring buyers into showrooms, they can cast a favorable halo glow over a car-maker’s entire line-up.
The problem cars are the ones sold in huge numbers which should be providing much better mileage and emissions numbers but don’t. There’s no reason a company that can produce a car with all the technology of a Corvette ZR1 can’t make a family car which gets between 40 and 50 miles per gallon. No reason at all, except for perhaps a general laziness among a company’s top engineers and the all-too-automatic tears-and-hand-wringing which starts every time the government (on behalf of the public) asks car-makers for improvements in safety, recyclability, higher mileage figures and lower emissions.
Which brings us to the other major problem in the American car-buying marketplace over the past 15 years: trucks.
Big pickups and SUVs were originally made to serve as work trucks and were usually found in huge fleets of vehicles bought by some of the world’s biggest companies. Back in the 1980s, when I was editor of an auto industry magazine, Automotive Fleet, about 25% to 30% of all car and truck sales in the US were to government and corporate fleets.
Car-makers worldwide took their cue from Detroit in seeing a unique opportunity in the US market which 
existed nowhere else. And that was shoving their V8 engines into full-size trucks and selling them to people like us, who had little reason to own, drive (and park) a truck which weighed as much as 6,000 pounds and had all the handling characteristics of an aircraft carrier.
Gas prices have thankfully knocked-down the number of big trucks being sold to folks who don’t need them; I only hope those numbers stay down as gas gets a bit cheaper (not surprisingly, OPEC is helping, too, by cutting oil production as prices get too low for even their ongoing and continued comfort).
We’ll let you know what we find next week at the SEMA Show, and we’ll probably see many of you at the LA Auto Show, too. Frankly, I’m hoping we have some great news on recycling, safety, gas-saving and emissions-cutting products to tell you about, as we file some of the first reports on the great automotive downturn of 2008.
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