The Booth Babe Chronicles: Psychology Of Auto Show Marketing, With Special Emphasis On Gender-Related Issues

Thank you so much for the warm welcome last week! I appreciate all your comments and encouragement and look forward to sharing more about auto show life with you.

A comment on my last column caught my eye. The gist of it was why bother with “booth babes” or professional presenters at all? Why not just have sales people or the actual engineers at the shows? It is a question that has been asked of me multiple times in different forums, so I’d like to address it in greater detail here.

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  • Kjhkjlhkjhkljh kljhjkhjklhkjh since most EVs are north of 70k specc'ed out + charger installation this is not news. You don't buy a new car every few years.This is simply saturation and terrible horrible third world country level grid infrastructure (thanks greedy exces like at the holiday farm fire where I live)
  • MaintenanceCosts I think pretty much all of the difference between this year and last year is that the right-wing noise machine, facing an audience crisis, has decided that EVs, and wildly distorted claims about EVs and EV mandates, are a good way to to get gullible people angry and start replacing lost traffic.
  • MaintenanceCosts I'd like to see a comparison between this and the base Model S, which should have similar performance numbers.I spent five days and 500 miles with a base 2022 Model S in Texas last week, and enjoyed it far more than my previous Model 3 drives - I think the Model S is a very good to excellent car, although "FSD" is a huge fail and I'd still have a lot of trouble giving Elon Musk money.
  • DesertNative In hindsight, it's fascinating to see how much annual re-styling American cars received in the 1950's. Of course, that's before they had to direct their resources to other things like crash-worthiness, passenger safety, pollution controls, etc. It was a heady time for car designers, but the rest of us have benefited immeasurably from the subsequent changes.
  • Cprescott Aside for how long it takes to charge golf carts since I don't live in a place where I can have my own charger, is the game that golf cart makers play when your battery fails and they blame you and charge you $15-25k to replace them.