Cape Town Motor Show: bigger and better but still ours
Cape Town – The 2018 Cape Town Motor Show was more professional in presentation than the inaugural edition 13 months earlier, but it hadn’t lost any of the distinctly local flavour that made it ours, rather than a smaller version of the international motor shows that are so cosmopolitan you sometimes have to remind yourself which city you’re in.
Not only the organisers but also the exhibitors had learned a lot from 2017; the Grand Arena was even more crowded with (mostly) new models and smiling representatives who’d been correctly schooled that they weren’t there to sell cars but to make friends – particularly among the wives who often have the final say even when their husbands are the ones who sign on the dotted line.
None of the new cars had ‘Please do not touch’ signs on them; kids were encouraged to sit in them, imagining the day when they’d be old enough to drive, while their mothers were invited to waggle a foot under the automatic tailgate or shown how to use the IsoFix child-seat mounting points, and their fathers held smartphones in front of their faces, capturing images that would no doubt embarrass the subjects in weeks to come.
Ironic, then, that the car that attracted the most attention among all the latest models was a 1964 Jaguar E-Type – once described by no less an authority than Enzo Ferrari as “the most beautiful car in the world” – even among show-goers too young to remember the stir it caused on its world debut at the 1960 Geneva Motor Show.
Source: iol.co.za