The Geneva International Motor Show is dead. After a protracted and undignified series of post-COVID death rattles, it’s now clear that the GIMS isn’t on the way back, at least in any form that we can recognise. The event scheduled for November of this year isn’t going to happen.

First run in 1905, the last edition of the show in 2024 was a sorry spectacle. Renault was the sole European OEM, and its 5 E-Tech was the show’s highlight, battling against a welter of Chinese SUVs that couldn’t wait until the Shanghai event.

So how did it come to this? The exhibitor list for 2020, when the show was cancelled at the last minute due to the pandemic, looked healthy. Look beyond the long list of manufacturers, however, and the list of debuts was thin. There were European debuts for the Kia Seltos, Toyota Mirai and Mazda MX-30 EV, and a world debut for the Toyota Yaris Cross… but that was about it. So what went wrong?

The writing had been on the wall for some time. Put simply, the Swiss had become dementedly avaricious. Local hotels multiplied their rack rates by a factor of five during the show and often demanded minimum 10-night bookings. A show stand itself with exhibitor fees could run into several millions of dollars. This threw the focus on return on investment. As a result, several car makers would hold ‘site-adjacent’ private viewings of new models, to avoid the cost of exhibiting at the Palexpo venue.

Unwilling to share the spotlight with a welter of other new vehicle reveals, manufacturers realised that controlling their own venue, publicity schedule and invite list would afford them a greater number of eyes on their new products. The pandemic only taught them how to be more creative in this regard.

It’s all a bit of a shame because Geneva was the best show on the calendar. The Swiss ran it efficiently, it was walkable from the airport, the show site was manageably sized and it lacked the stuffiness of Frankfurt, the chaos of Turin, the dystopia of Tokyo or the risk of hypothermia that was Detroit.

Had it not been for greed, you’d have bet that this neutral venue, which could attract 600,000 paying visitors and 10,000 freeloading journalists, would have been the last motor show standing. Instead, the best of the lot was one of the first to fall on its face.

After a brief flirtation with moving the franchise to Qatar, Geneva promised zero exhibitor fees for 2025, an exercise in shutting the stable door long after the horse had bolted. When it was clear that nobody of any consequence was tempted, the GIMS organisers, with a typical lack of introspection, blamed the popularity of the Paris and Munich shows.

Given the popularity of this year’s Shanghai event, perhaps there’s life yet in the motor show. But maybe not in Geneva.

This article originally appeared in the August 2025 issue of Wheels magazine. Subscribe here and gain access to 12 issues for $109 plus online access to every Wheels issue since 1953.