The IAA in Munich was a great success according to the organization. Not a word is mentioned about the disruptive actions of climate activists. And rightly so, because they clearly had no idea what was going on inside the walls.
At the beginning of last week I was at the IAA in Munich. What a joy that there is finally room for such an event after a year and a half of noticeable distance between the car manufacturers and the general public. Finally one could once again stand face to face with the newest cars. Yet it was a different fair than usual. In the first place because it is actually far too short-sighted to describe it as a car fair. It wasn’t called ‘IAA Mobility’ for nothing. This was about much more than cars. Mobility, in whatever form, was central in Munich. There was even a complete hall set up for bicycle manufacturers. Admittedly, that was not as crowded a hall as the halls where the major car brands stood, but still. That hall was also difficult to cope with, because between the bicycles were also Segways, electric scooters and hoverboards (yes, Back to the Future may be right, although it still has wheels on it).
Secondly, it was not a traditional car fair for the simple reason that you could only find cars with a combustion engine here and there if you looked closely. The vast majority of the models shown were fully electrically powered. It is evident that the future of driving is also electric according to the major manufacturers. There was also plenty of attention for the broader picture, because we will not save the world with electric driving alone. BMW, for example, showed the i Vision Circular to draw attention to the need to look at new ways of manufacturing and use of materials to reduce the entire footprint of a car. In addition to the unveiling of the fully electric ID Life, the Volkswagen Group paid extra attention to CO2-neutral production, car sharing and more sustainable battery production. Finally, Mercedes-Benz showed with the EQG Concept and the Mercedes-AMG EQS that iconic names and sporting departments also move with the times. In short, a progressive wind is blowing through the car industry, although of course it will take some time before we hopefully start to reap the benefits on a large scale.
All in all, for someone like me, with quite a bit of petrol in his veins, it wasn’t exactly a purse to lick your fingers. I’ll admit that honestly. Petrol heads could better ignore the IAA this time and possibly in the future. The IAA was all about innovation, revolutionizing the world of mobility and saying goodbye to old practices. I don’t know how it could have been any more progressive. It therefore felt a bit strange when I walked out in the heart of Munich on Sunday evening after a Volkswagen press conference about climate-friendly ways of building cars and suddenly came across a group of Greenpeace protesters. I had just heard stories of massive change to the auto industry as we know it and then saw banners portraying the auto industry as an old-fashioned monstrosity. That didn’t rhyme. Just as little as the fact that the young protesters were more than happy to accept drinks from people who were allowed to enter the bar.
It was just a harbinger of what would happen two days later. Tuesday afternoon we were again in the center of Munich, where various electric cars could be admired on open stands. Throughout the city you could try out EVs, but also electric scooters and shared cars. Everything to get from A to B more efficiently and cleaner, in other words. When we then wanted to return to the exhibition halls, we stood in a traffic jam for an hour in a roaring petrol car. Activists had blocked the highway to the stock exchange, we heard. The result was a traffic jam in almost all of the east of Munich. Bearing in mind what I’d seen and heard in the previous days, I could only draw one conclusion: those guys had no idea what was happening at the IAA. Maybe things aren’t moving fast enough for them, but the auto industry just can’t make a complete change of course overnight. Change is really happening and there is so much more in the air, maybe it would have been a better idea for the protesters to just quietly visit the IAA and see and hear it up close. It saves another afternoon of stationary polluting cars and a lot of annoyance and maybe it makes them even more hopeful about the future. Two birds with one stone.