Organic Mutant

This past week, an inordinate amount of my time has been absorbed by the annual ritual and phenomenon known as the NAIAS, commonly referred to to as ‘Detroit’ or ‘The Detroit Autoshow’, but formally labelled the North American International Auto Show. This event, held each year in the dead of winter, is not just any auto show. It is the mother of all auto shows. Carshow Mecca, so to speak.

Each year, literally dozens of new production and concept vehicles make their worldwide debuts during the three-day press preview portion of the show, wherein about 6,000 ‘reporters’ from all corners of the globe converge on contrived press conferences and consume copious amounts of catered confections, coffee, and other free forms of caffeine and sugar. The good part about this calorie orgy would be the simultaneous dispersion of marketing materials (photos, hype, and other propaganda) and the subsequent rapid-fire dipersal of the latest information and images of the wares of the automakers of the world.

The rise of blogging and inescapability of the 24-hour news cycle has shrunken the lag-time of dispersion from what used to be a month or more to mere minutes. One of the best sites for auto news, autoblog, had their man David Thomas on the scene, with 10-15 updates per day. Autoweek offered a continuously updated catalog of debuts plus an interesting, if spotty, blog of their own. The show even inspired GM grand poohbah (Vice Chair of Product Development) Bob Lutz to start his own blog, FastLane. Not too shabby.

The most worth ready for anyone without my unhealthy obsession would be this one from the obscure detroitblog. The reason his account is so interesting? Try this:

The fact is, I know nothing about automobiles, except how to drive them, and to a lesser extent how to steal them.

Hawhaw.