This is what the auto industry used to be like for every car company at any big auto show: glitz, glamour, fast cars, big dreams, bold predictions and astonishing models draped across cars to drool and die for.
At this year's Frankfurt auto show – which runs Sept. 17-27 – most of the old ways were gone or at least well out of sight. Except for the Volkswagen Group, at least when it came to the company's pre-show bash on the evening before the show opened to the public.
The People's Car company long ago shed its roots as a maker of cheap, air-cooled, rear-engined runabouts. Instead, VW is now a global powerhouse with the publicly stated intention of becoming the biggest and best car company in the world – no later than 2018, and preferably before then.
This is in sharp contrast to most of the rest of the automotive world.
Going into the Frankfurt show – the planet's biggest this year and by far the most important – the car business was mostly about bankruptcies and takeovers, of barely profitable companies from Europe taking control of completely insolvent ones from Detroit.
The industry overall is under enormous pressure to cuts costs, cut emissions, improve productivity, extend fuel economy, develop useful technology and package all of it in appealing designs.
The established car companies, meanwhile, are feeling the heat of the new players from emerging economic powerhouses such as China and India. It now seems clear that Chinese car companies will take control of, or form tight alliances with, at least one if not both of Sweden's car makers, Saab and Volvo. Tata of India has already bought Britain's Jaguar and Land Rover. Fiat controls Chrysler and Canadians teamed with Russians are poised to take over Germany's Opel, once a General Motors crown jewel.
And if that seems odd, consider this: The world's largest car company, Toyota, says it will post a multi-billion-dollar loss for the second year in a row.
Naturally, going into the big Frankfurt extravaganza – two million square feet of show space, 62 product introductions and 753 separate exhibits – the signs of cutbacks, cautiousness and even raw fear were everywhere.
GM, for instance, used to fly over legions of executives to do little more than chat among each other and the hordes of media types. The meals were good, the rooms comfy and the work minimal. This year, GM chief executive officer Fritz Henderson was seen anxiously prowling the show floor accompanied not by the usual phalanx of hangers-on, but instead just one public relations official and one obviously harried aide. He was busy and he looked it.
But at VW's pre-show party – for 2,018 journalists and seemingly half as many more VW Group types in a concert hall outside of Frankfurt – music blasted from loudspeakers and the endless parade of champagne and hors d'oeuvres were grabbed and gobbled with enthusiasm. Unlike most car companies, VW is profitable.
And unlike any other car company, the multi-brand VW Group had an army of senior executives pitching a parade of impossibly luxurious speedsters and limousines, small family station wagons, electric cars and even mini cars. One after another, the CEOs of VW's 10 brands (other than newly acquired Porsche) came out to make the case for one new model after another.
Bentley Chaiman and CEO Franz Joseph Paefgen (L) introduces the new Bugatti Grand Sport Sang Bleu — AFP/Getty Images
Among them: the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Sang Blue, which is made largely of carbon fibre and powered by a V-16 engine; the Bentley Mulsanne, which requires 450 hours of hand construction and is “the opposite of mass production,” according to VW; and the Lamborghini Reventon Roadster, which can go from 0 to 100 km/h in about 3.5 seconds and costs nearly $2-million, not including fees and taxes.
