Visitors can still find the past and present at this car show: There is actually a diesel engine right at the front of the Mercedes exhibition stand. Four cylinders, the silver surface is repeatedly and fondly fondled by a booth employee. As always at an auto show, you could say. But these days you have to be sure that this is a bit out of date. Just like the diesel station wagon placed next to it.
Hardly any of the first visitors to the International Motor Show in Munich’s exhibition halls and out in the city at the “Open Spaces” are interested in gasoline and diesel. Everyone wants to see the new battery-powered cars, of which there are actually many to see this time, including at Daimler, of course, that’s not the case. But this time the avant-garde are different. BMW has put an eco-car on the stage that is not only supposed to be a vision, but also represents a new “way of thinking”, as CEO Oliver Zipse explains: a small car in which they have dispensed with moldings and decorations. With the help of BASF and the recycling specialist Alba, the manufacturer wants to achieve a “circular economy” in which a car is made of recycled material as much as possible – the goal is 50 percent by 2025. And it should be constructed in such a way that it can then be recycled later as easily as possible. It’s a question of image, but it’s also a question of cost. And it’s a completely new approach: Talking about waste products at a car show.
You can’t see more clearly than here in Munich how the industry is currently taking different paths. Especially in view of the climate debate, everything is in disarray – or, in a positive way, the future of mobility is more open than ever. The first automobile exhibition at the new location in Munich should be different, said the chief lobbyist Hildegard Müller. Not cars, but “solutions on the way to climate neutrality” should be the focus.
Because there is no longer one technique that is only varied as it used to be. Two years ago it went something like this: Mercedes presented its C-Class, which was roughly the same as the new BMW 3 Series, which was roughly the same as the Audi A4, which premiered next door. Industry and its fairs have always been the declination of steel and cylinders, nothing else. Plus as much headlights as possible and a couple of super sports cars from Ferrari and Lamborghini as an eye-catcher.
Volkswagen owners did not come this time
How much times have changed can be seen on the eve of this fair. And nowhere more clearly than at Volkswagen. The corporate reception was always a solemn affair, with all brands showing off their cars: Audi, VW, Porsche, Bentley, Seat, Skoda and so on. The family owners of the two branches Porsche and Piëch always traveled from the Salzburger Land and explained their view of the auto industry in general and the managers at VW in particular, and finally the works council got one more thing.
This time none of the owners came because they weren’t really invited: the VW management decided that the focus should be on factual issues. And those aren’t even vehicles. They brought only one with them to the Isarpost in downtown Munich, and even that is in the back of a garage: a futuristic minibus with all kinds of antennas and cameras. CEO Herbert Diess has a different future for the auto industry in mind than BMW and Daimler. He not only believes in electrification, which for him has already been completed, but also in robo-shuttles.
At the entrance are Greenpeace activists who have brought a banner that reads: “Von Wegen Klimaschutz”, with the V and W painted in bold. For Diess, this was yesterday’s debate, because VW relies so much on electricity. It is almost “a little unjust” that Greenpeace is demonstrating here, he says of the activists, who are eyed by the police. And inside he talks about where they have set up a living room setting and are serving vegan bites, actually from robotaxis the whole evening. Next to him on the couch: Bryan Salesky, the head of the robot technology company Argo AI, in which VW and Ford are involved. People want vehicles like this, say the two, that it is a multi-billion dollar market and that they will be launched in just a few years.
At Mercedes you see everything a little differently: The Swabians had also tried robotic taxis, together with Bosch. But both companies found: Too difficult and too expensive. Now they prefer to build expensive assistance systems in expensive electric cars.
And they show some of them on the previous evening. The start of the Daimler Group’s trade fair, at which new models are traditionally presented, will not take place in a specially rented location this time, but in the Munich branch – which, with its twelve floors, is just a little less representative than the Frankfurt Festhalle in which the Swabians had previously shown their car show for 16 years.
Ex-Daimler boss Zetsche discussed until late at night
All of the cars with combustion engines – which they of course also sell – are tucked away behind a large black curtain. And that evening nobody at Mercedes is talking about diesel and petrol either. Instead of “sustainable luxury”, which can be seen primarily in the fact that the newly introduced electric cars are primarily intended to appeal to well-heeled customers: even the all-terrain vehicle, the G-Class, will be electric in the future. The right party atmosphere like before, before Corona and before this change in drive, does not arise – which may also be due to the fact that people are badly partying with a mask. Only one person discussed very animatedly until late at night: the former Daimler boss Dieter Zetsche, who had previously watched the presentation of the new electric models in a dark corner, quite undisturbed and perhaps largely undetected because his distinguishing mark, the distinctive mustache, was behind buried in the white FFP2 mask.
In conversation, he looks a bit like an elderly gardener who wanders through his beds and is happy about how his seeds are slowly growing. After all, this turnaround, the shift away from diesel and gasoline to electric cars, has already begun under his direction. The gardener Zetsche has sown, his successor Ola Källenius is now allowed to bring in the harvest. Isn’t the former corporate executive no longer worried about the German auto industry? A short smile. “I’ve never done that before.”