Contrary to initial rumours that Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Cologne would make it through to the final round of the contest to stage the “IAA” motor show in 2021, the present location of Frankfurt is now out of the running. Hannover, Cologne and Stuttgart are also no longer being considered.

German automotive industry association VDA (Berlin; www.vda.de) decided on 29 January 2020 that it would continue talks with Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. The association had originally intended to reduce the number of candidates to two by this time – see Plasteurope.com of 02.12.2019. The VDA executive committee headed by Hildegard Müller will, as previously agreed, make the final decision before the beginning of March.

“The ideas presented by each and every city are highly creative and certainly challenging,” concluded the committee, which said the selection procedure was a “very close race.” The concept presented by Frankfurt was also described as “very impressive,” but was nevertheless not enough for the city – which has organised the IAA and its preceding events for nearly 70 years – to win through against the tough opposition. The internationally established term “Frankfurt Motor Show” is thus, for the time being, history.

However, whether a change of venue will be sufficient to hike up the number of visitors and win back the confidence of the many exhibitors who stayed away – see Plasteurope.com of 17.09.2019 – remains to be seen. The falling numbers at the 2019 edition of the IAA – 550,000 visitors against 810,000 in 2017 and 931,000 in 2015 – are indicative of the general crisis automotive shows are currently facing, as more and more automakers skip the big shows in favour of smaller events with customers and the public.

The automotive industry faced a challenging year in 2019. Demand went up in Brazil, but it decreased in the US and Russia. The Asian markets did not fare much better, with China, India and Japan failing to match the 2018 levels. With 21m new registrations, the Chinese passenger car market saw a 10% decline against 2018, when sales had already contracted. The Indian market had done well in 2018, but only 3m new passenger cars were sold here in 2019, a decrease of 13%.

The European market saw a modest growth of 1%, which represents 15.8m new registrations of passenger cars. By EU country with the largest markets, sales increased 5% in Germany and 2% in France, stayed roughly the same in Italy and declined 2% in the UK and 5% in Spain. All in all, 20 of the EU-28 markets plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland showed positive results in 2019.