GENEVA MOTOR SHOW: What was hot, what was not

Nature abhors a vacuum and sometimes the stuff that fills the vacuum is far more interesting than what was there before.

Some huge chunks of the traditional Geneva motor show layout disappeared this year, with serious automotive players like Ford, Hyundai, Opel, Jaguar Land Rover and Volvo all sitting this one out.

They were hardly missed. Their acreage was divided up between a hosts of newcomers or reallocated to other mainstreamers and Geneva returned to its early 1990s feel of a boutique supercar/designer show given gravitas by OEM volumes.

But for every hit at the Geneva motor show this year, there was an inevitable miss, sometimes from trying too hard, sometimes from misreading the market and sometimes, well, you’ll see...

HOT: Peugeot. All of it.

The French outfit’s design team is on fire at the moment (well, it was three or four years ago, when its new designs were penned).

Even if you don’t love the 208’s exterior design (and a surprising number of working car designers didn’t), you can’t help but be impressed by its interior. It’s classy, it has a lot of tech that’s not expected at this price and it genuinely moves the game forward in the B-segment.

Then there’s the 508, which looks terrific in sedan and wagon form and just jaw-dropping in 508 Sport Engineered concept form. And even that’s being built.

Mate that up with an enormous lion, the news that it’s headed back to the US, finally, and a reappearance by the velour-interiored e-Legend concept from the Paris motor show and it was all winning.

NOT: Subaru Viziv Adrenaline

It’s difficult to know why Subaru bothers with the Geneva motor show. It sells in miniscule numbers in Europe (limited, mostly, to Alpine areas) and it’s almost sad to see it not knowing when to stop banging its head on the wall.

The Viziv-branded concept was no surprise, because that’s what Subaru does. This time around it was a lumpy, hunky, misshapen off-road coupe of a type that not even Land Rover wants to lose money on.

And it was so underdone that Subaru never bothered to give it an interior.

The saddest thing about the bright blue concept car wasn’t its own awkwardness per se, but that none of the production cars on its stand look remotely like it, meaning that even if Subaru liked the reaction to it, it would never build it like that anyway.

DUNNO YET: Ferrari F8 Tributo

Now, plenty of people liked the F8 Tributo. And plenty didn’t.

It wasn’t just that Ferrari’s taking a third bite at the platform apple that was the 458 Italia, either. (It traditionally takes just two before a full replacement platform but it’s a listed company now, which is probably not a coincidence.)

So the 488 was a facelift of the 458, complete with a new twin-turbo engine. The F8 Tributo owes most of its underbody existence to the 488 Pista, but Ferrari denies even that.

Still, the car looked way better in blue than in red, which seemed odd, and while some of it looked stunning, other parts of the design looked like they’d been phoned in.

HOT: Audi Q4 e-tron

They’ve already thrown out the first production Audi EV in the e-tron. It’s already short-listed for the World Car of the Year award. Then it popped out the e-tron GT, based on the Porsche Taycan.

In Geneva, it was the turn of the 2020 Q4 e-tron and it was a rock star.

Audi CEO Bram Schott insisted the Q4 e-tron was "as close as you can get” to the production version so that’s good, because the Q4 e-tron looked crisply styled and not overdone.

NOT: Mitsubishi Engelberg Tourer

The Outlander plug-in hybrid has been a powertrain eye-opener and this is a teaser for what its replacement will look like. Which isn’t a cheerful prospect.

The Outlander was a fully internal piece of kit, the Engelberg Tourer takes advantage of Mitsubishi’s alliance with Nissan and Renault to share their platforms and technology. Which should have made it easier.

Besides Engelberg being a Swiss ski resort that’s neither near Geneva nor a noted Japanese haven, the seven-seat concept is so laden with chrome that it surely cancels out any benefits of the part-EV powertrain.

Honda had a big win with the Urban EV concept when it appeared in 2017. Like, huge. It was the tiny EV that paid homage to both Honda’s past and its future in a cheeky, cheerful design that everybody – everybody – loved.

It’s now a big step closer to production and while you can see the original clearly, you do have to scratch the surface a little harder. There is the more raked rear screen, the sticky-outy door handles and the loss of the front end’s tautness.

But there’s enough charm still there and while it’s going to cost a bit and will have just 200km of range, people will love it.

HOT: Nissan IMQ

Tried to hate this. I’d seen the sketches and they merited hate. Somehow the panel beaters turned that oddball, slab sider into something a bit more cohesive and satisfying

It helps that you know there’s a three-cylinder e-Power hybrid on the way in the production version, but not in the normal way of hybrids. This is more like a range extender, with the engine charging the battery full time and never engaging the transmission directly.

And it looks menacing without overdoing it, so, no, didn’t hate it.

NOT: Volkswagen I.D. Buggy

I don’t know what I’m finding more disconcerting about this car. It could be that Volkswagen is claiming a cool, fun legacy that isn’t theirs to claim. It could be that I don’t think it works in any visually appealing way. It could be that I’ve seen it roll and it’s got about a credit card’s worth of wheel travel.

Either way, the Kermit Green buggy was well received on the stand, but less so (I’m told) within the halls of Volkswagen USA – the very place you’d imagine it would be met with great joy.

What did they want? A really big SUV EV, thanks very much, and more stuff Americans like.

If you want to see a really cool interpretation of a variation of the Dune buggy, take a peak at James Glickenhaus’s SCG Boot.

DUNNO YET: Mercedes-Benz EQV

The cynic might suggest they whacked a shiny EQ-style lights-and-action grille onto a stock V-Class van. The hopeful might think it is actually a breakthrough in people moving in style, comfort and environmental responsibility.

It’s been Benz’s mid-term strategy to stuff EV powertrains in existing bodies and platforms and this is just another one of them (like the EQC).

But was it really a breakthrough? Did it really move the needle for any useful purpose? Will it actually work (it does a lot of private limo service in Europe, so it could)?

Our second car is a Panda. Pandas rock. They are the less stupid smart, with four doors and almost no more length.

I heard about the Centoventi (120 in Italian, which is how old Fiat is these days and about how many non-Pandas or 500s it sells a year) and all I could think of was “Don’t screw up the Panda. Don’t screw up the Panda. Don’t screw up the Panda”.

It’s an EV (as if that’s going to happen with FCA’s R&D budget) and it has style, it has 500-style options and it has battery-swap tech built in to counter its 100km range. It’s kind of like a ‘90s Nokia like that, and the plan is that people can buy it with one, two or three batteries.

But the great part is that the looks retain the Panda’s simplicity and effortless cred.

NOT: Mazda CX-30

Are we witnessing the end of Mazda’s reign at the top of the volume-car design tree? The Mazda3 is clearly the best-designed car in its class, but the CX-30 looks like the automotive version of the contractual-obligation album rock bands burp out when they’ve already signed to another record company.

They phoned this one in. From a beach. In the bar. Under a cocktail’s tiny umbrella.

Not saying it’s bad, because plenty of car-makers would add this to the range and it would sit proudly at the top, but it’s just not what we’ve come to expect from modern Mazda.

It will sit between the CX-3 and the CX-5 when it arrives in Australia (off the Mazda3 platform) in late 2020 at the earliest.

DUNNO YET: Alfa Romeo Tonale

Stop it. It’s no joking matter. Tonale is actually an Alpine pass in northern Italy, not far from the more-famous Stelvio. And you’re pronouncing it wrong in your head.

Anyway, it’s everything we’d hoped for from the Mazda. It’s gorgeous, rounded, a car of few lines, aggressive up front, proportioned at the back and it even references some of its recent predecessors, like the 159, with the triple lights.

And the concept allegedly runs a hybrid powertrain, probably from the Jeep Compass plug-in.

The downside is that it’s too small to fit off the Giorgio rear-drive/all-wheel-drive architecture that sits beneath the Stelvio and the Giulia. So it will have to sit on the only other FCA architecture of about this size, and that’s the one beneath the Compass. Which was previously seen beneath the Fiat Bravo/Ritmo. What was previously seen beneath the Fiat Stilo.

And that means it’s very, very old, even if it has seen upgrades over the years. And that worries me.

HOT: Koenigsegg Jesko

There are two reasons I love this car, and they say more about me than the Jesko.

Firstly, I saw one in camouflage wrap hammering through Geneva’s streets deep into the night of the first press day (don’t ask what I was doing there: I get jetlag by osmosis).

Secondly, it had been given its name as a tribute to Christian von Koenigsegg’s dad, who dropped into the workshop every day. And, sworn to secrecy, every one of Koenigsegg’s 200 employees kept silent for a year until it was shown on the stand, to Jesko’s tears.

Also, suggestions are that it’s rather brisk, with the carbon-fibre monocoque engineered to handle its 5.0-litre twin-turbocharged V8 that rips out a frightening 1177kW and 1500Nm.

And it’s claimed to hit 482km/h.

NOT: Lagonda All-Terrain Concept

Claimed to be a rival to Rolls-Royce’s Cullinan, but with a design inspired by luxury superyachts. It was probably inevitable that the Lagonda ended up with the worst possible taste from both genres.

Still, it’s pure electric, so that’s something, and it’s on sale in 2022, which is something else again.

Still, Aston Martin made the Cygnet as the tender vehicle for the mother ship. At least now they’ve built the mother ship.

There were some cracking lookers on the Geneva floor, from Kia’s EV concept to Peugeot’s already-seen concept to its 508 hotrod, but they’re part of a fading genre.

Maybe gorgeous design can bring them back, maybe not.

But the motor show halls were a far more SUV-rich environment than sedans.

Yep, Rimac had its own big-power C_2 EV sports car, based around the Croatian’s own chassis architecture, suspension architecture and, more critically, his own battery, power management and electric-motor technology.

But so did other companies. Rimac, who sold 10 per cent of his business to Porsche last year, put his technology beneath Pininfarina’s gorgeous, clever Battista as well.

If that wasn’t enough, it was also beneath the all-electric Lagonda. It may have been better looking if they’d left the body off it.

Nothing new of significance, again. Makes you wonder why they bother having a stand here.

Still, best coffee in the show, with Italian baristas imported especially for the event.

They’ve been slumping a bit, with Detroit crumbling so badly it’s moved from winter to summer.

The Paris show saw basically all the Germans waving goodbye and it seems inevitable that the French will return the favour at the Frankfurt show in September.

And yet, here’s neutral Geneva, being really interesting and fun and lively.

See more Geneva motor show photos in the full gallery on motoring.com.au