A new Geneva Motor Show-type event is coming to London, and it’s going to be huge

Goodbye and good riddance to the brutal, bleak, politically shambolic winter just gone. Hello and welcome to the warmer, lighter, generally safer spring and summer ahead of us.

The next six months should be the best, easiest and most enjoyable of the year for driving. But don’t forget, we and our passengers of voting age are circa 50 million-strong. To say that we have collective, but under-utilised political clout is a huge understatement.

So in addition to preparing your existing car – or even buying or leasing a new one – for the spring/summer, get ready for imminent local elections in parts of Britain and even the possibility of a General Election ahead of the scheduled cut-off point in 2029. Ballot boxes provide beleaguered, ripped-off car users with their best chance to tell politicians how badly they feel they’ve been treated, and what they’ll be demanding in the near future.

I’d love to give further good news by saying the Geneva Motor Show – once the greatest annual car exhibition on earth – is coming back from the dead. But I can’t. Because it isn’t.

But thanks to a plucky pair of entrepreneurs with years of auto-exhibition experience, a new Geneva-type show is scheduled for Britain around this time next year. Like the Swiss Palexpo, the chosen venue is colossal, concrete and a stone’s throw from a city airport.

So, applause please for the London International Motor Show (LIMS) at the Excel centre. Initially at least, it’s being promoted as a three-day event, from 26-28 February next year. But if sales of exhibition space and public tickets go well, there seems no reason why it couldn’t be an annual event with public entry days extended into early March.    

Excel has long been the venue for occasional or regular car exhibitions and races (including Formula E). So it’s a familiar location – and therefore as qualified as any place to stage a Brit version (well, sort of) of the once great, now defunct Geneva bash.

It’d be too easy to argue that Blighty can’t do car exhibitions as well as mainland Europe, and that the London International Motor Show will be the same as the previous incarnations known as the plain old London Motor Show, London Motorfair or whatever. But credit where it’s due, eh? Alec Mumford and Stephen Maitland-Oxley are investing much time and money bringing the London show to us in 2027… and beyond, hopefully.

Similarly, another proud, hard-working British entrepreneur, Andy Entwistle, successfully delivered The British Motor Show at the Farnborough Exhibition Centre between 2021 and 2025. And he’ll be doing the same from 21-23 August this year.

Many major car-producing countries don’t stage local motor shows in their capital cities or national car exhibitions in more rural areas on an annual basis. But from 2027, Britain will do both. And for this we should be immensely grateful.

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