LA Auto Show rebrands, reorganizes press and trade days, becomes AutoMobility LA
The show will combine the auto show and Connected Car Expo press and trade days to bring the tech and auto industries even closer together.
Earlier this year, I wrote about AutoMobili-D, the cleverly named addition to the Detroit auto show that covers the growing blend of the tech and automotive sectors. Its Los Angeles counterpart is doing something similar, but it's foregoing an additional exposition and simply lumping the media and trade days of the standard show and Connected Car Expo into a singular entity: AutoMobility LA.
AutoMobility LA isn't referring to itself as an auto show. Rather, it's being marketed as a "bona fide trade show," which will bring together automakers, tech startups, suppliers, investors, developers -- just about everyone, really -- under a single roof between November 14 and 17. To accommodate the additional presence, the group is building a new, 50,000-square-foot Technology Pavilion that bumps up against the convention center.
The auto show isn't going away, though. In terms of the show as it relates to consumers, its name will continue on as LA Auto Show. This refers to just the media and trade days, the span of time when the unwashed masses of media all schlep down to California to bring you the latest new-car reveals.
If you think you can just skip all the newfangled crap and keep writing about car reveals while shoving your face full of free shrimp (I think I'm projecting a bit here...), you might want to check the schedule. As an analogue to the mixing of cars and tech, AutoMobility LA's new schedule is all mixed up, with automaker press conferences split nearly evenly between two days, sandwiched between a great deal of tech content.
This doesn't have to do with making it easier for the media so much as it has to do with making the whole show a productive environment for deals between various corners of the industry. AutoMobility LA cites the Connected Car Expo as something that helped kickstart talks between GM and Lyft, which eventually resulted in the automaker dumping $500 million into the ride-sharing company.
Whether your interests lie in wearables, alternative mobility, autonomous driving or just about anything tangentially related to technology or cars, AutoMobility LA hopes to bring it all together under one roof during media and trade days. It starts on Monday, November 14 and runs for the whole week. The first keynote speaker will be Ford CEO Mark Fields.
Update, 11:04 a.m. Eastern: Added clarification that the consumer portion of the auto show will continue to exist as the Los Angeles Auto Show.