SHOW BIZ

The motor show is dead, apparently... nobody told Munich. But what's a day pounding the carpets really like in 2025? We dispatched Sam to soak it all in

- WORDS SAM BURNETT

PRESS DAY 6:50am Phone alarm goes off. I wonder briefly where I am and begin my daily audit of what hurts this morning. So tired. I left the window open overnight for a bit of air, and I can hear the announcements from Munich’s main station next door. This is the second motor show I'll have been to in the past eight years, weird to think that three or four of them a year used to be part of the timetable. I need some coffee.

7:05am

I've just got time for a shower and a quick stare at the wall. A fit check before I leave the room. I'm going for ‘unemployed car designer’ in my suit jacket and light black jumper. Used to be you had to dress up for a motor show like you were going to a wedding because of the mingling with important executive types. Now they all wear trainers and no one knows what to do.

7:24am

On a shuttle. It’s a perk, being ferried about town in style, but it’s founded on the humiliating but entirely accurate principle that journalists can’t be trusted to get anywhere by themselves.

8:03am

Ah, the Messe exhibition hall. There’s an instant whiff of nostalgia as I emerge from claustrophobic panic of the revolving door (it’s manual - takes me approximately six seconds to realise). I think the smell must be the exhibition carpets that take a lifetime of traffic in a week and get stuck in a skip afterwards. The main entrance looks like a train station with no tracks, all glass and giant screens.

8:19am