Auto show! Part Four: Mission to Moscow

Suzuki makes cars in addition to making their popular motorcycles. No one realizes this. I read a positive review of the new Suzuki Kizashi in Automobile Magazine a few months ago but still forgot about their entire automotive division, despite the car's name being memorable for sounding like the ingredient in an Odwalla fruit juice. Because of this I was surprised when I saw a Suzuki car display in the basement of the New York Auto Show. Suzuki themselves apparently forget they made cars also because the basement was reserved for truck displays and the Munster's drag racer. (Really)


Suzuki must have decided they were sick of no one remembering that they make a four door that is by all account well built but bland to the point where I've already forgotten what it looks like despite having looked at a picture of it 90 seconds ago to jog my memory so I can write this. (Though to be fair to Suzuki that may be because I looked at the Munster's car immediately afterward, which is a car so cool Rob Zombie wrote his best song about it.)

Lets put a picture of the flagship Suzuki car, the Kizashi, here for a point of reference:


I'm not really being fair to Suzuki by making fun of this car for being bland, it is no more derivative than any of Hyundai's or Kia's takes on family cars, and it has kind of a sporty look. It just doesn't do enough to stand out when it doesn't have voice of Jeff Bridges making me want to buy it like Hyundai does (and I will do anything the star of The Big Lebowski tells me to) or the cleverness of Kia ads which I have already talked about at length in this blog.

(But seriously Kia ads are awesome their fun red guy was even hanging out in 2D cardboard cut out form at the auto show)


Suzuki is not going to take having unmemorable cars lying down though. They decided to bring along a concept car to the Auto Show that was, well, I can most succinctly describe it by saying it would have been right at home at the Tokyo Auto Show in its early 2000's zany heyday.

(I am not going to stroll down memory lane to put the above Tokyo statement in context. This is obviously tangential, but if you read this blog you know it doesn't so much have a point as a series of overlapping tangents of various lengths.)

Back in 2001, Automobile Magazine covered the Tokyo Auto Show with an article that focused entirely on the ridiculous cartoon looking concept cars that were so common at the Tokyo show until this recent recession forced the Japanese automakers to scale back the divisions of their companies that apparently only existed to create ridiculous impractical concept cars for the Tokyo Auto Show.

These cars where never meant to be stylish or buildible. Most weird looking concept cars at auto shows in every city that is not Tokyo are built to attract attention but also to show off some specific new technology that will be later used in future production cars. Mercedes once built a show car for a European auto show that company itself stated was built entirely to show off the tires and suspension technology it had. The Tokyo cars were not like this, because all of the technology they incorporated was insane.

These cars all seemed to have been designed by Hayao Miyazaki after a long night of Jager and LSD. (actually come to think it the movie Poyno probably was also the result of this.)

One of cars shown in the Automobile Magazine article was a Toyota called the Pod. I just found a description of it on Wiki and it is even weirder than I remembered. The car had artificial intelligence developed by Sony, which allowed it to do things so ridiculous I cannot make them any funnier than this non judgmental description of them from wikipedia:

"The car could also judge the attitude and mood of the driver based on their reactions and how they are driving, and could offer advice on how to improve their current mood. The seats inside are like stools which could freely spin and rotate. On the exterior, the Pod could express its own feelings with coloured LEDs - red for anger, yellow for happy, blue for sad - and an antenna that wags, much like a dog's tail."

(this car also somehow managed to look ugly, boring, and weird all at the same time not an easy feet.)

So it was a car that can get angry, and will give you suggestions on how you can be happier (Hal9000 springs to mind, "I can't let you merge dave.") But the folks at Toyota didn't think all that was quite enough to make their car stand out so they found away to make this car uber creepy by giving it the ability to independently wags its antenna. The writer at Automobile summed up this Toyota nicely by stating all its weird features "where, either genius or insane or both."

This idea of genius, insane, or both, describes nicely the Suzuki concept car they brought along to the New York Auto Show. It's the perfect car for the Robot Beach Boys to drive on their 2087 reunion tour. Its insanity cannot be described nearly as well as it can be shown so it is pictured below:




This car has a roof made out of surf boards and with the whole contraption, including the surf boards, is painted a color that could only be created by eating a traffic cone and then vomiting it up.

I can make fun of it all I want but you and I will both sure as hell remember that Suzuki makes cars from now on. I really can't fault them for this. They obviously set out to create something stupid and ridiculous and exceeded beyond what I would have thought possible.

This beach buggy is not a convertible but it has no back wind shield and integrated surfboards welded upside to the A and B pillars, because roofs are for squares.

I assume this last item is a safety feature. This way if you are near the beach and your car falls off a small cliff and lands upside down in the ocean you can use the surf board roof to surf on your car to safety. When use a wave to ride your car back to dry land you don't even have to leave your car to sit and enjoy the sun, because instead of seats it has leather beach chairs:




(P.S. about this post's title: I remembered from my days as a video store clerk that there was a Police Academy sequel called Mission to Moscow. Due to my extensive research before using it as the title of this post, I discovered that it is in fact the title of the 7th movie in the series. Despite having seen a lot of dumb movies I've never had the desire to see any Steve Guttenburg movie that was not Short Circuit, so I've never seen any of the Police Academy movie, but 7 movies? thats 1 more than their are Star Wars movies, and 4 more than their are watchable Star Wars movies.)

Auto Show Part III: In Search of Spock

I was really curious about what Toyota's pitch to the auto show attendees would be, In April around the time of the show they had just been given the largest fine ever given to an automaker by the U.S. Government. Toyota at the show went with the approach employed by the Pirate Captain in The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists and just ignored the problem and carried on as if they were still every person over 40's vehicle of choice (This is not a stereotype, Toyota's average owner's age as of a few years ago was 43).

Their section consisted of the usual auto show assortment of rotating displays, and bad actresses in business suits over enthusiastically telling you how purchasing the car behind them will solve all of your life's problems. There was one thing they did differently though. Near the end of one of the be-suited failed actresses speeches, she pitched people on going over to the Toyota Avalon display to watch the next person stand in front of a car and talk about it. But, apparently the next Avalon display was a little different. The Avalon display was not a display at all, as the women informed anyone in earshot, it was a lounge.

How was this circular area with a rotating car in it a lounge you may ask? Well apparently it had some black pleather seats in it that looked like the kind of furniture that a propaganda video made in the mid-1970's by the U.S.S.R. might have used to represent bourgeoisie Americans in a Jazz club decadently listening to "hip" American music. But fear not, Toyota decided to show that were not out of touch by providing a hip band to play background music in their "Avalon Lounge."

And while live music was a nice touch and definitely caused them to stand out from the other displays, Toyota choice a really stuffy string quartet whose last gig was probably the New Years party held by Christopher Walken in the movie Batman Returns, which you could tell was hip, because Walken was dressed like this:(Walken was technically playing a character named Max Shreck, but was really playing Christopher Walken. Actually specifically he was playing the same version of Christopher Walken he played in A View to a Kill, where his name was Max Zoran, which i think we can all agree is a much better name than Shreck. And not just because Shreck is only one letter away from Shrek. Though I'm sure thats a part of it. Those last four sentences were apparently written by Andy Rooney. Cracked has a whole article about Walken ripping himself off.)

So yeah, Toyota isn't exactly trying trying change their image as the official car of middle aged accountants. And maybe with the current turmoil they face over transparency and reliability, that is a good thing.

(Before we move on This might be a good time to explain that I don't have any pictures of the Avalon Lounge because I kept falling asleep trying to take them. (you see because the display was boring. Rim Shot.)

But Scion, the brand they created specifically to appeal to young people must have had an uber-hip display right? Actually it came across much more like the pensioner who designed the Avalon Lounge was asked about what the young people were into. And he had once watched the ads during an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with his grandson during the late 1980's. The designer/Ginkgo biloba enthusiast had seen an ad for mircomachines and decided that they were what all the cool kids were into. So he had them build a micromachines playset to store Scions in. Except because Toyota's display designers were involved, they decided to take this idea and make it more boring then you ever thought imaginable. Which is how, one assumes, they created this display:


Cars! Stacked up vertically, a little bit! with some projection screens! This is what the kids want! Those kids with their skate boarding and their hip-ity hop, and their wireless telegraphs!

Breaking News: the long promised auto show follow up

Yes only a month after it occurred I'm finally posting some more about the advertising awesomeness and foolishness at the 2010 New York Auto Show. This blog is nothing if not punctual.

Part of the display for Mini consisted of two Minis being restrained, one with a leather dog leash and the other with a thick rope.
When I first say these the only thing I could think of for the Mini in the leather collar was the Mini was trying to appeal to bondage enthusists.

The one with the rope around it, especially with the leather collared Mini already establishing that that part of the Mini was supposed to be the neck, made me think Mini was showing one of their criminal cars being hung at the gallows.

Obviously neither of these impressions are what Mini was going for. In terms of the "gimp Mini" I'm sure that's just me being dirty, but I think the mini with the noose might actually give that impression to people besides me.

Mini cleared things up with slogans explaining each design on the ground on the side of each display, which you can see partially in the above photos. The Mini with the studded dog collar said, "Please Do Not Feed" and one with the rope said "172 Horses Packed into a Pint Sized Corral." The Horses slogan is particularly clever with its horse power pun. Reading the slogans the viewer garners that since mini put a dog collar and leash on the mini that was supposed to be a dog, they wanted to put something horse related on the mini with the horse slogan. I guess putting a really big saddle on the mini would have not shown off the car's looks as well, but i have been thinking about the display for a while know and it just dawned on me that the rope is supposed to be a lasso. Maybe I'm just exceptionally think, but I think even with the horse analogy the rope still doesn't scream "lasso." And I think a rope with a slip knot in that is mounted vertically high above the object it is around is much more associated with a hanging than it is with horses. Maybe they were originally gonna go with a slogan like, "Judge Roy Bean ordered this outlaw car be hung by the neck until its fight stop a-kickin" but then realized that was a bad idea and back tracked with the rope being a lasso.

So creative ads, but not in the ballpark of the clever magazine ads mini has had since their debut, such as fake parking tickets to give people's cars which compliment their car on being cool, and their ad with suggestions about what to paint on the white top of your Mini.

I couldn't find either of those ads I just mentioned by google searching, but I did find this ad, which isn't quite as clever but gives you an idea of Mini's print ad design scheme.



Mini ads with their black backgrounds and minimalist approach make Mini one of only two car companies I can think of that has had a recognizable template for their ads for as long as I can remember. Indeed the only other company I can of that has ads as recognizable for their layout is Porche.

Gas pedals on Dutch built cars can only be operated safely whilst wearing wooden shoes

I went to the New York auto show a few weeks back, and realized that many of the promotional displays were cool enough, or ridiculous enough to merit a blog post or two or three depending on how excited I get.

This picture is of part of the Volvo display. This foolishness is what inspired me to start taking pictures to do a post about the displays. The slogan was “Scandinavian design inspired”, which combined with the shelving and random wooden decorative objects makes me think Volvo is trying to sell cars by comparing them selves to Ikea. Maybe to the ad guys who created the phrase “Scandinavian design," this means their cars are like some awesome well made Scandinavian product that is popular throughout Europe which I'm unfamiliar with, or maybe they are saying this car is as well crafted as something else Scandinavian like the band ABBA, or the Swedish bikikni team, or award winning actor and full time handsome person Stellan Skarsgard.

But all I think of when I see shelving units and the phrase Scandinavian craftsmanship is Ikea. Which just makes me think of furniture that comes in a box the size of an Uno card, which consists of 2000 screws and is supposed to be assembled with one thin little alan wrench made of a light blub filament. This really is not the image marketers should try to bring to the forefront of a car buyers mind. Unless they are selling kits from which you can assemble one of those custom full size wooden cars, which are awesome.

Volvo's Scandinavian brethren, Saab, who as a former asset of the now federally owned General Motors has gone from being on the brink of being disbanded completely, to being almost bought by tiny Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg in the summer of 2009, a deal which fell through when it was revealed no one, anywhere had ever bought a car from Koenigsegg, and that company just consisted of just one guy. So Saab was back to as state impending doom for the rest of 2009 until they were bought (for real this time) in February 2010 by an other tiny supercar company, the Dutch company Spyker, which has made and sold even fewer cars than the zero Koenigsegg had sold.

I figured since Saab is technically right now not owned by anyone, since the ink is still drying on the Spyker deal and Spyker is busy getting sued by the Saab Aerospace company, I assumed Saab's current Hospice nurse GM would not pony up much dough for a display. Surprisingly Saab had a welcoming display with high production values. A few other automakers had furniture in their areas to encourage guests to stay longer. But the rest of the furniture at the show at the show were all very modern and uncomfortable bench style apparati integrated into the walls of the display. Saab actually sprang for comfy padded chairs, and consequently had the only seating I saw anyone actually sit in the whole show.

Pictured above: a couple discussing how the would never buy a Saab in a million years because Saabs are Dorkmobiles, but also discussing how the appreciate Saab providing them with very nice chairs to relax in before they stand up again to go look at cars they actually like.

(actually I do like the rear styling on whatever model Saab is in foreground of the picture.)

Well that brings us to the end of the Swedish portion of the New York auto show, so I think that this is a good time to break. More on the auto show when I think of things to say about the other pictures I have.

I'll leave you with the musical stylings of the greatest Scandinavian band ever. In fact I would go so far as to say these guys are the best thing to come out of Norway since Berserker Vikings. Here is Hurra Torpedo covering Bonnie Taylor's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" using an chest freezer and a couple of stoves and steel girder as their rhythm section.

(Thanks to T. Cunnion for showing me the Hurra Torpedo clip 4 years ago.)

BONUS Stellan Skarsgard fact: Actors Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly named their child Stellan after Mr. Skarsgard. Bettany said in an interview on Conan O'Brien that he wanted their child to be named Stellan not just because Skarsgard is a good friend of theirs, but also because Skarsgard has the highest alcohol tolerance of any person Bettany has ever met, and he was hoping the name would help pass along this trait.