It's show time in Bangkok

"There's nothing like this anywhere in the world," grins a Harley-Davidson representative as a Playboy bunny wags her cottontail nearby.

It's not that Harley is displaying motorcycles at a show – that happens around the world – but that political correctness elsewhere has made the skimpily-clad accompaniments something to be frowned at, but not here.

And while you may expect Harley to culture this image, at the Bangkok show almost everyone does: The country's main oil and gas company opposite has 'pretties' on its stand.

Welcome to the 36th Bangkok International Motor Show.

Thanks to demography and economics the Bangkok show has emerged as the region's biggest motor show. The organisers claim it is now the fifth biggest motor show in the world, with 46 million visitors over the years – 1.8m of those last year alone. Little surprise then that the manufacturers put on a song and a dance. Literally.

With those sorts of numbers come sales too — 40,000 vehicles were sold at the 2014 show. Plus as the region's vehicle manufacturing hub, producing almost 2.5 million passenger cars and pick-ups in 2012 — around a million of which were for export to markets like Australia — the show has become one that increasingly attracts an international audience.

So what started three decades ago in a park in central Bangkok has evolved into a peculiar hybrid of local and international: where a locally-based Japanese executive makes a presentation in English, subtitled in Thai, and sometimes English too; where a 50-foot Cranchi motor yacht is on display amongst the motorcycle stands; and where having 'pretties' on your stand carries no stigma. It can be slightly bewildering for your average farang.

See more photos of the 2015 Bangkok motor show

The opening ceremony, for instance, is held in an enormous hall – with interior design by the same person who did the palace of Versailles for Louis XIV – in the yet more enormous Challenger Impact centre in Bangkok's sprawling suburbs. The most senior representative of the main exhibitors is invited on stage one-by-one, before being asked to simultaneously hit a button in front of them that sets off a light show and signals the start of the show.

Even the Malaysian journalist next to me shakes his head in disbelief, and not only because half the presentation is in Thai. Then again, at least the Bangkok show is not the standard, vanilla car show. In some ways, if you've seen one of those, you've seen them all. Besides the appearance of the occasional new (car) model, there's nothing new about motor shows.

These days to see the latest supercar you only need to go to wherever it is in your locale that the rich folk congregate: Potts Point; Toorak; anywhere in Monaco or Dubai.

To see them driven by rich idiots is somewhat galling, but to see them static is even less exciting. Look, but don't touch: where's the fun in that?

The same could be said of the 'pretties' at the Bangkok show, but perhaps that's not a bad thing. A Singaporean friend asked me to identify which ones were the transgender models, and I couldn't say for sure. This is a country where, even in the mainstream press, debate rages about whether or not this year's Miss Thailand pageant winner is prettier than the Transgender Miss Thailand.

I suspect calling them 'pretties' is the pragmatic Thai way of getting around the confusion – it's a non-gender specific term after all – and one suspects being a 'Go Pro girl' may send the wrong signals.

For the media day we get the entertainment, though not everybody puts on the razzle-dazzle. Ford, for instance, is quite restrained. Yes, there are thousands of cameras trained on events as the Ranger and Everest are presented, but the stand looks a bit like a ghost town after the presentation ends. No 'pretties' here.

I'd expect BMW to be the same, but it meets halfway with a song and a dance featuring people in futuristic garb on roller-skates. Then again, its highlight for the show was the local launch of the i3.

Mercedes-Benz claims to have a new concept for a motor show stand, and before the presentation I'm inclined to agree – there are no cars on display at all. With the stand roped-off, the cars are presented one-by-one and even do some laps before being parked in position. One suspects they'll stay there for the duration though. You can't go around bowling over potential customers.

Chevrolet, meanwhile went all out with a choreographed fight in which our hero saves a damsel in distress (at least from a box in the tray of the higher-spec Colorado High Country pick-up) from a bunch of bad guys. I'm not sure I see the connection, but it was a crowd-pleaser.

In a similar vein, but without the play acting, Aston Martin rolled out the James Bond theme, pulling the wraps off the Vanquish Carbon Edition, the second-most expensive car on the stand, with a pricetag of 25,900,000 baht ($A1m), twice the Australian price thanks to taxes and duties.

Aston Martin's new Regional Director Patrik Nilsson has a wry smile about the Bond theme, but says he defers to the local distributors when it comes to how they deal with customers. With a private lounge area and catering on hand, he reckons they can look after existing and prospective customers, and also help position the brand.

Aston Martin may be 100 years old, but in a country that saw its first five-star hotel built in the 1970s, even these venerated brands need some positioning. At least there is some tasteful restraint on display.

At the other end of the scale, the BRG Group, which distributes Carlsson kits for Mercedes-Benz among others, went with riding crops and models in body paint. Again, the connection was lost on me, but it was a hit with the throngs of camera-wielding press.

Nilsson told me he had recently moved to the region because he couldn't expect to understand the market if he worked remotely. I'd argue that you can live here for 20 years and still not get it. But that doesn't stop the Bangkok International Motor Show being entertaining. Quite the opposite.

See more photos of the 2015 Bangkok motor show