Auto Show Has Plans to Be a Big Wheel : Marketing: Event expands, opens earlier and moves to Anaheim Convention Center in bid to compete with L.A., Detroit expos.
The Orange County Auto Show, held since 1985 in the parking lot of Anaheim Stadium, is moving indoors this year as it maps out an ambitious route to becoming one of the West Coast’s premier new-car expos.
The annual show, which opens Saturday at the Anaheim Convention Center, is not likely to overtake the internationally known Los Angeles and Detroit auto shows. Both open in January and provide manufacturers the opportunity to show off everything from their newest economy cars to their most unconventional concept vehicles.
But the Orange County Motor Car Dealers Assn.’s show, formerly a February also-ran, is now the first of the season in Southern California. It opens the same day as the San Francisco show and beats the Long Beach show by four days.
And by moving to the convention center, the expo can use 310,000 square feet of space to give visitors a chance to see and compare more than 500 vehicles. The show features the Southern California premieres of a dozen new models, including convertibles by BMW and Ferrari, Land Rover’s Defender and Ford’s redesigned Mustang.
Regional expos “are very important sales tools for us,” said Mark Fields, Western marketing manager for Ford Motor Co.’s Ford Division. “We get to show our entire product line to a lot of people in very nice surroundings.”
There are 200 auto shows across the nation each year. Most of them “give manufacturers a place where consumers can touch and feel your products,” said Dick Macedo, marketing director for Kia Motors North America. Kia, a Korean car maker, will begin selling cars in the United States in January and will debut its initial offering, the Sephia sedan, at the Los Angeles show Jan. 8-16.
The Orange County show, to kick off its 35th year and celebrate its new time and location, has a theme this year: a celebration of Southern California in general and Orange County in particular as a center of automotive design.
“There are 18 major design studios between Ventura County and the Mexican border,” said show Chairman Bob Tuttle, a partner in Irvine-based Tuttle-Click Automotive Group. “I call them the secret design labs because they rarely let people see what they are working on or even how they do it.”
But right in the middle of the showroom floor for the nine-day run of the show, he said, will be a 5,000-square-foot display of automotive design.
The interactive exhibit will highlight the work being done by Southern California auto design studios. It will include a display of computer-assisted design methods and a demonstration by students from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena who will spend the entire show sculpting full-scale clay models of cars they have designed. Show-goers will have the chance to do a little clay modeling themselves at one of the displays.
Organizers are hoping that the design exhibit will be a draw, and they are certain that the cars themselves will be.
In previous shows, the Orange County dealers association was ecstatic when attendance climbed over 200,000. This year, says association Director Kevin Allen, the goal is 300,000. That’s far fewer than the 500,000 to 600,000 who attend the Los Angeles show annually, but it would be a quantum leap for Orange County.
Attendance figures are significant to the dealers and manufacturers who display their wares at regional shows like Orange County’s. Studies have shown that 60% of the people who attend an auto show plan to buy a new car or truck within six months and go to the show to make final comparisons and cut down the time they must spend visiting dealers’ showrooms.
“You get more time to share your story with potential customers at an auto show than from a 30-second commercial on TV,” said Kia’s Macedo.
Though its U.S. headquarters is in Irvine, Kia will not be represented at this year’s Orange County expo because international auto-show rules require production cars to publish their prices before they can be displayed. Kia won’t issue its U.S. prices until January, Macedo said, “but we’ll be in the Orange County show next year.”
Fields estimated that the typical display at a large regional show like Orange County’s costs each dealer-manufacturer team “from $10,000 to $40,000,” with most of the bill paid by the dealer that sells that particular car.
In contrast, a medium-sized car company like Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America can easily spend $800,000 to $900,000 on a display at the Detroit Auto show, said Richard Recchia, executive vice president of the Cypress-based importer and distributor.
Mitsubishi, whose dealers are exhibiting the 1994 product line in Orange County, will unveil a new 1995 model and a futuristic concept car at the Los Angeles show two months later.
Why not do it in Orange County? Because, while the show is important for attracting customers, it doesn’t draw the automotive press, whose reports will give Mitsubishi tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of exposure.
“The Orange County and Long Beach shows are good consumer-exposure shows,” Recchia said. “But they just aren’t hyped to the level of the Los Angeles show.”
The dealers who participate in shows like Orange County’s don’t find that to be a big drawback, however.
“We usually see an increase in sales immediately after a show, and we expect there is also a long-term benefit that we haven’t been able to measure,” said Lee West, president of Newport Imports in Newport Beach.
West’s company sells cars that are not impulse buys: Jaguars, Range Rovers, Ferraris, Lotuses and Aston-Martins. And West says that, if he can sell a few extra $40,000 to $125,000 cars because he sets up a display at the Orange County show, other dealers probably will see a similar benefit.
The show will run from Saturday through Nov. 28, including Thanksgiving day. Hours are noon to 9 p.m. Saturdays and weekdays, noon to 7 p.m. this Sunday and noon to 6 p.m. on closing day. Admission is $6 for adults, $4 for people 55 and older, and $3 for children from 6 to 12 years old.
Keeping Track of Trade Show Mileage
There are 200 car shows in the United States each year. The three considered nationally significant are the Los Angeles and Detroit shows, both set for Jan. 8-16 next year, and the Chicago show, Feb. 4-13.
California is home to seven new-car shows each season. In chronological order for 1993 and 1994, they are:
Sacramento, Nov. 10-14.
Orange County, Nov. 20-28.
San Francisco, Nov. 21-27.
Long Beach, Nov. 24-28.
Los Angeles, Jan. 8-16.
Inland Empire, March 23-27.
San Diego, April 20-24.
