What’s Happening With the Geneva Motor Show?

Following Montreal in January, and Chicago and Toronto in February, car enthusiats used to turn their attention to Europe in March to catch the Geneva Motor Show at Palexpo. Sadly, the COVID-19 pandemic killed the event in 2020, and no one knows for sure if and when it will be back.

While things are mostly returning to normal across the auto industry, the prestigious Swiss event remains, well, a no-show. As a matter of fact, the 2023 edition that was supposed to take place from February 14-19 was cancelled a long time ago.

Knowing already that they wouldn’t have enough exciting content to display, the show organizers threw in the towel back in August of last year, citing uncertainties in the global economy and geopolitics that prevented a number of car brands from committing.

Of course, people will always go where the money is. Oil-rich Middle Eastern locations like Dubai and Qatar are prime examples. The country that hosted the FIFA World Cup last November managed to convince the Geneva Motor Show team to run a satellite event in Doha every two years. The inaugural edition is scheduled for October 5-14, 2023.

The Qatar Motoring Festival will have three main strands: a conventional static exhibition in the capital’s centrally located Doha Exhibition and Convention Centre, a series of driving events on Qatar’s Lusail racing circuit, which is about 20 km north of the city centre, and a program of off-road driving events at nearby Sealine, where the desert meets the ocean south of Doha.

The hope after that is to bring back a traditional Swiss show in Geneva’s Palexpo centre in February 2024, but no decision or announcement has been made yet. Our fingers are crossed.