When it comes to the L.A. auto show, the Porsche stand has always been the place to go.
Set apart in a self-contained space near the main entrance, it has always been a kind of walk through Porsche’s cultural heritage, a mix of displays taken from design, engineering and motorsport. It added up to what always seemed like an especially good diorama from the Porsche Museum, only with a special urgency and cleverness, like the Jungle ride at Disneyland.
But this year we walked into what appeared to be the showroom of a Porsche dealership. A very nice dealership to be sure, perhaps in Hamburg.
It sparkled with chrome and gleaming white surfaces, and the cars were parked in orderly rows. There were friendly people to give you sales information. So it’s not like there were multi-color pennants snapping in the breeze like at some used-car lot. In fact as Kurt Niebuhr’s photography reveals here, the space had very strong sense of design in a cold, German sort of way.
But this was not the full sensory experience of the automobile that we had always recommended to our friends, the perfect auto-show experience of what it is about cars that makes us want to drive. In fact, it looked rather too much like the Volkswagen stand, as if it had been poured out of the same corporate can that now contains Audi, Porsche and Volkswagen in one financial entity.
We’re sure that Porsche will do better next year. After all, it’s more important than ever to ensure that Porsche is set apart from its partners, and the best way to do this is to tell a story, not line up a bunch of cars in orderly rows.
Porsche should be about the Drive, not the Sale.
Michael Jordan, Executive Editor, Edmunds.com
agnh says:
07:31 AM, 11/21/11
A cold display or not, I'm just glad Porsche is showing up. Is was only about two years ago that several manufacturers, Porsche among them, were drastically scaling back their auto show appearances.
panamera4 says:
10:52 AM, 11/21/11
I agree, I went to the Porsche VIP event this year and it felt dealer run in the sense that it was packed and impersonal whereas when I went I couple years before It was much smaller, brand focused, and I was able to have a one on one conversation with Jerry Seinfeld.