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Frankfurt 2015, the “Adapt or Die” Moment

I never imagined I’d grown into a car guy who’s hopeless at car bets. No, really, I’m so bad at making automotive related bets that I might just quit this habit altogether. For one thing, I wouldn’t have imagined that, out of all the fresh metal Frankfurt has brought, a watch would be the centerpiece of the event for me.
I’m talking about the Mulliner Tourbillon Breitling timepiece. You know, the one that sits inside the Bentley Bentayga and makes for the most expensive car option ever. It’s not the expected $200,000 price of the watch that got to me, but what it symbolises. It’s all about time and the hour is just right for major carmakers to face the harsh reality - adapt or die!

Whether we’re talking about Porsche or Renault, many big names on the Frankfurt floor have shown us the time has come to leave petrol romance behind and do whatever the market requires in order to survive.

I haven’t used Porsche as an example by accident. The Zuffenhausen people have shown they can step out of their comfort zone not once, but twice during the event.

While the Mission E, Porsche’s second electric car is the obvious example here, it’s the reworked 911 that made me think of all this. When you have a Carrera S that can lap the Nurburgring almost as fast as the Carrera GT, you should put this on a billboard, right?

Wrong. The 15 percent jump in efficiency thanks to the new turbo engines was the headline, with the ‘Ring time being dropped somewhere in the depths of the press release.

And then there’s Renault. You don’t have to be into cars to know the French carmaker has a huge fetish for cutting costs. And yet here we are, looking at how the new Megane teaches the entire compact class, Audi-BMW-Mercedes included, about the engineering virtues of four-wheel steering.

And, just like the Mission E, the Megane is out for Tesla blood. No, it doesn’t have an electric powertrain, nor does it race supercars. But it comes with an 8.4-inch portrait-orientated infotainment screen. I may have exaggerated a bit with the statement above, but this is how wild such an upgrade is in the Renault world.

And don’t imagine this chameleon attitude is limited to technological progress. Let’s take Bentley for example. In theory, the could dismiss tuners, issuing a press release in which they deem such projects as “inappropriate”.

However, Crewe has understood that many of their new-age customers want to spread far past what the company’s Mulliner personalization options offers. So the German motor show saw their CEO giving a personal inspection to the Startech-customised Bentleys present at the event. And no, nothing went wrong during the stunt.

Stunts go well with shenanigans, which is what Alfa Romeo has pulled. I have to admit that, even after the tons of tips on the stellar performance of the Alfa Romeo Giulietta QV, I was still a bit surprised to find out this has become the fastest sedan on the Nurburgring.

That was the effect of all the years of waiting for Fiat to do something about that front-wheel drive bug in Alfa’s system. But I can only be happy about the Italians understanding you can’t plan an US market takeover without doing your homework. One US fiasco (read: Fiat 500 launch) is enough.

Japan isn’t missing out on the reality check moment either - I had been thinking about how Nissan should turn the GT-R into a sub-brand for quite some time now and it seems the carmaker has finally decided to do it.

Sure, they’re using the Z instead of Godzilla to build a sports-family, but the point still stands.

And speaking of watches, Frankfurt has left me wishing for the time to pass quicker. That would allow Ford to stop displaying the GT prototype at every car show, giving us the actual car instead. You know, the one that now has a turbocharged V6 instead of a V8...
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About the author: Andrei Tutu
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In his quest to bring you the most impressive automotive creations, Andrei relies on learning as a superpower. There's quite a bit of room in the garage that is this aficionado's heart, so factory-condition classics and widebody contraptions with turbos poking through the hood can peacefully coexist.
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