Toronto Autoshow

I went to the Toronto Autoshow with a group of my colleagues from work. Being an automotive company, they gave us free tickets and an afternoon off to go check it out. We walked around for about 5 hours looking at all the different cars. Being a hinge designer, I took the time to check out some of the ways that the different car makers design their hinges for the side doors, hatches, and hoods. It was interesting to see the various implementations, but I think most people wouldn't even notice.

There were some interesting concepts but, sadly, no electric cars. GM had their Chevy Volt car there, but it was pretty obvious that it's still in the early development stage. They had a cover hiding the interior of the car so you couldn't see the console or the controls. I suspect that the interior is largely unfinished and the cover was there to hide the ugly prototype functionality that they had in there. I'm not even sure if the car could be driven or not. Here are some pictures of it:







I recently read an article about how the GM head of product development believe that global warming is a farce so I really don't think that they're taking this car too seriously. I think it has more to do with marketing than anything else. I'll be surprised if it makes it to production by 2010.

There were some other interesting cars out there like this one:




We also checked out some of the products that our company makes like this step on the Ford F150 tailgate. Naturally, we had to stop and take a few pictures:



Describing the versatility of the MultiPole:


The Lamborghini exhibit showing the history of their line of cars was pretty cool. It was interesting how the styling has changed over the years. I managed to get this picture of one of their newer models:



There was also a neat little motorcycle section showing some slick Ducatis and other bikes:







I had a thought of having a small truck as my next vehicle so I decided to check out the Chevy S10. I stepped on the rail they had on the truck and felt it move. I took a closer look and found that it was loose and kept getting looser the more I put weight on it. I pointed it out to some of the guys...you show a bunch of engineers something and they jump on it like kids on a jungle gym. One of the GM show people came over and said that it was show quality rather than production quality. I thought it was ridiculous that they showed something that flimsy at the premiere Canadian autoshow. Here's a video showing how flimsy the thing was.




Overall, the show was pretty good, but after 5 hours of looking at cars I was beat and ready for some dinner.