SEMA 2016: It’s massive!

If you want to try and understand the SEMA show then get your walking shoes on … because it’s big.

And when I say big try 120,000 square metres of exhibit space, more than 2400 exhibitors, 140,000 visitors and more crazy cars pumping out more horsepower and shredding more rubber in one place than you’re likely to find anywhere else on earth.

SEMA stands for Specialty Equipment Market Association, a non-profit trade association for businesses in all types of vehicle customisation – an industry it estimates to be worth nearly $US40 billion per annum.

From small beginnings back in the 1963 it has grown to become a powerful global organisation – it’s even got representation here in Australia. More than 6600 companies are now members and it gets into all sorts of political, lobbying, educational, technical, business and editorial activities on their behalf.

But the SEMA show is the highest profile part of its operations by far. It started as a small affair in the car park under Dodgers stadium in Los Angeles back in the 1967, with 98 booths and around 3000 attendees. Now it occupies four halls at the massive Las Vegas convention centre, as well as spilling out onto the forecourts and car parks outside, where the roar of high-powered V8 engines, and the shredding of rubber is intermingled with pounding rock and roll and endless numbers of people.

This place is the church of horsepower and judging by the accents and skin colours worshippers have come from all parts of the globe to be part of the congregation.

One of Australia’s best known tuners Rob Herrod has been coming here now for a decade and he wouldn’t miss it for the world. We meet up at ‘Ford Out Front’ where punters are queued up to go for wild slideways passenger rides around a car park in a bevy of tuned Blue Oval machinery.

We’re separated from the action by a single row of concrete blocks and a chicken wire fence. In the car park is a street light with an unpadded concrete base, which the cars and trucks regularly slew around.

“Could you could imagine doing this in Australia, drifting cars and so forth,” laughs Herrod. “A Current Affair would be out there doing a story about it!

“It’s just a great place,” he enthuses. “It’s a happening place, it’s a really good joint. It is the best of the best. The best time to be here is early in the morning before the crowds arrive and just walk around because there is some really good stuff in here. Really good.

“I love it, I thrive on it. I have been a mechanic for 42 years and I have been coming here for 10 years. I remember the first time almost running from stand to stand picking stuff up for my business.”

What’s really important to understand about SEMA is it’s a trade show – so that means it’s not actually open to the public. Yep, the punters are allowed out on the forecourt to peruse hot metal and go for hot rides in Fords, BMW M cars, Chev Corvettes and gosh knows what else, but if you don’t have the right pass then the security guards make sure you’re not getting inside.

That’s handy actually, because it’s so crowded inside it would be Bangkok gridlock if it was open slather.

While the big guys like Ford Performance, Chevrolet and Fiat Chrysler’s Mopar division have sizeable stands, clustered around them – like villages around castles -- are thousands of smaller displays showing off every conceivable performance item you could imagine, lots of them with four-wheeled eye candy centre-stage to draw in browsers.

Western Australian supercharger manufacturer Sprintex is one of around a dozen Aussie companies that has taken up space in 2016 and chief operating officer Tyrone Jones says it’s been absolutely critical to the company’s progress into the US market.

“This is our ninth year coming to SEMA,” he said. “It has benefitted us hugely, particularly in the last three years from a brand standpoint. Before that we were small and insignificant. It is really important to get the right booth and the right products on the booth.

“In the last two years partly through SEMA and partly through our own sales team we have gone from 14 dealers in the USA to 340 dealers. Year on year we went through a 40 per cent (volume) growth in 2014, a 75 per cent growth last year and we are looking at – in the aftermarket – another 70-75 per cent growth again this year.”

The SEMA show not only acts as an exchange of business cards, contacts and contacts, it’s also a melting pot of cool ideas. In amongst the outrageous hot-rods, the 4x4s and trucks so lifted you can walk under them, the myriad of tuned Mustangs, ridiculous Ferrari-engined Toyotas and – probably – Toyota-engined Ferraris, the latest big thing is just waiting to get out.

“This is where ideas are born, this is where things are first seen. So we go out there and we try to identify trends,” explains Todd Beddick, Senior Manager -- Mopar Accessory and Performance Portfolio at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.

“One of the big things we first saw coming out here at SEMA was black wheels. It seems simple, but it started here, you started to see those alternate finishes.

“And now they are in most of our portfolios on most of our vehicles and on the Mopar line.”

Beddick is in control of the budget that pays for Mopar’s SEMA show-stoppers. This year it’s brought six vehicles here, headlined by Shakedown, a 1971 Dodge Challenger in ‘Bitchin’ Black’ paint and powered by the updated V8 crate engine Mopar is using SEMA to launch.

The other vehicles vary widely in scope and ambition, from the CJ66 that combines elements of three generations of Jeep’s venerable off-roader – now known as the Wrangler – to a Pacifica people-mover festooned with accessories, albeit pretty much untouched mechanically.

We’ve previously detailed those vehicles here.

My favourite is the van that flips up its sides to become a portable pub. And that’s one of the coolest things about SEMA. It’s happy hour from 4:00pm to 5:00pm, so grab a free beer from a stand or from the helpful SEMA vendors that wander the aisles and have a sip while you drink in the hectares of spectacular sites.

And then it’s easy to realize that, with feet aching and the soles of your shoes worn through, calling SEMA big doesn’t really cut it.

In terms of size, sights and experience, it’s simply massive.

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