William Jeanes on the Chicago Auto Show

If you’ve never been to a major auto show, it’s time you went. And by major shows, I mean Detroit, Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles. At any of these venues, you can see just about every interesting car that’s sold in North America and all of the boring ones.

My own favorite show is the one in Chicago, which–tragically–takes place in February, a time in the Windy City when even the strongest of men and the stoutest of women wish to hell they lived in Palm Beach. Or even St. Louis.

Weather aside, Chicago has the best facility in which to hold an auto show, McCormick Place. It is this soaring, spacious series of exhibit halls that raises walking the floor and looking at cars to a point far above the crowded, cattle-drive atmosphere that characterizes the New York and Detroit shows. And I’m just talking about press days. When the public shows up at any of the four shows, its not impossible to have a good look at that Porsche or BMW you’ve been wanting, but it’s anything but simple.

(Click through to read the rest of William’s column.)

How do you get to attend press days? It helps to be a professional writer with a recognized byline. Especially at Chicago, which from observation does the best job of separating the wanabees from the really-ares. Even so, if you have any connections at your local newspaper or television station, you might convince some hapless employee there to write a letter to the show organizer requesting press credentials. The addresses you need can be found on each show’s Web site. This might actually work, except for Chicago, but you’ll feel guilty. Some of you, anyway.

The alternative is to show up on a weekday during the days that the show is open to the public. Get there at the opening bell and you can have at least a couple of hours of pleasurable, unobstructed, guilt-free viewing.

And, as noted above, the best place to do this is Chicago.

Last year, I wrote a column for Automotive News, the industry’s weekly bible, in which I put forth the heretical notion that our country’s national auto show ought to be in the Windy City rather than in Detroit–where I lived for nearly a quarter-century.

This act was understandably perceived as treasonous by my Motor City pals and made it potentially more difficult for me to obtain credentials for New York and Los Angeles. Honesty demands that I admit to not having spent time at the new Los Angeles facility, but I have spent time, stultifying and unpleasant time, on the freeways you use to get there, and I didn’t like it. New York is another matter, because I own property there and used to live in Manhattan, so if my thoughts on Chicago require me to grovel at the instep of the New York credentials lady, so be it.

The thought of moving the elaborately named North American International Auto Show from Cobo Hall, one of the country’s few Third World exhibit halls, to Chicago so upset my good friend and associate, Ed Lapham, executive editor of Automotive News, that he penned a tart response to my infidelity, in which he outlined the many advantages of Detroit.

The only two advantages that I remember Ed pointing out were (1.) That many industry executives are available for interviews at Detroit–to which I say, they would be available in Chicago if that’s where the show was–and (2.) That Detroit had one thing that Chicago would never have: a foreign country just across the bridge. Well, as you can imagine, he had me there.

Windsor, Ontario, is in fact visible from certain vantage points at Cobo Hall and can be visited with ease if you are traveling on a diplomatic passport. Fancy my forgetting the exotic attractions that lie only a brief drive from the Detroit Pothole Museum, also located near Cobo Hall. Not only can you visit casinos, pole-dancing clubs, and Chinese restaurants by the dozen, you can do so at an unattractive currency-exchange rate. Maybe it was the falling dollar that took my mind off Canada.

This year I am again at the Chicago Auto Show, having taken a pass on the NAIAS at Detroit. I did this because I just love the city of Chicago and because the press officer keeps the crowd down by the highly original means of restricting press passes to real press persons.

I watched the Detroit show on the Internet–which you can do as well–and from my workstation in the hamlet of Madison, Mississippi, I was maybe ten minutes behind the news emanating from faraway, and far colder, Michigan. You can try this at home and you don’t need professional credentials.

Of course you’ll miss out on the festival of fun that is Canada in the dead of winter.