Cape Town • South Africa • Expos
We write about motor shows and expos from the inside of the hall, in the city where the Atlantic wind decides what a soft-top is worth. The rest of the site covers touring, luxury test drives, comfort over four hundred kilometres, hire and the slow business of choosing.
In this issue
The lead photograph
Visitors walking the aisle of a Cape Town motor expo in the first quiet hour of the day
Why this site exists
Two of us live within walking distance of 14 Bree Street, and between us we have spent more weekends in exhibition halls than is strictly reasonable. The habit started as a way to see a lot of cabins in one afternoon without a salesperson following us around a forecourt. It turned into a stack of notebooks, and then into this site, because the same five questions kept coming from friends in their fifties and sixties who wanted a car for the Karoo run and not for a lap time.
A show hall is a strange place to make a decision. The lighting is flattering, the carpet is thick, the engines are silent, and the cars sit on polished turntables with their doors held open at the one angle that makes the back look roomy. None of that is dishonest, exactly. It is just not the N1 at Beaufort West with a cooler box behind the front seats and a headwind that drops your range by sixty kilometres.
So we write two kinds of notes. One kind is about the halls themselves: floor plans, where the quiet hours are, which stands let you sit in the car without a pitch, how far the walk is from the parking to the first door. The other kind is about everything a hall cannot show you, and that part is longer: ride quality over Sir Lowry's, how a cabin behaves at four in the afternoon with the sun straight ahead on the R44, what a service plan costs once it lapses.
6
long guides in the show hub
14
Bree Street, city bowl
R650
a show-day walkthrough, indicative
4
passes within ninety minutes of us
Everything we cover
The show halls are what we know best, and they get the hub and six long guides. The other six subjects run through the home page, the price list and the questions page, because nobody chooses a car from an expo alone.
01
The core of the site. Which halls in and around Cape Town are worth a full day, how a stand is built to flatter a car, what the quiet first hour is for, and why the second visit is the one that teaches you something. Also the small things: cloakrooms, the walk from parking, and where to sit down when your back has had enough.
02
A concours is a slower animal than an expo, usually on grass, usually with owners standing beside their cars for six hours. We cover the Winelands lawns, what the judging sheets actually reward, how close you may lean, and what it costs in diesel and nerves to trailer a car of your own to a display.
03
Routes out of the city that reward an unhurried driver: the R44 under the mountain, the long haul to Prince Albert over Swartberg, the N2 east to Mossel Bay at four hundred kilometres. We write about where to break the drive, which passes are unkind in the wet, and how to plan a day so you are not descending Du Toitskloof in the dark.
04
We drive the expensive ones when we can get them, and we report on the things that matter after ninety minutes behind the wheel rather than after ninety seconds. Seat shape and whether there is real lumbar support or just a knob that moves a bladder about, noise at a hundred and twenty, how the suspension copes with a corrugated gravel approach road, and whether the touchscreen demands your eyes when the N7 is empty and you want it to.
05
Our longest-running interest. A car that is pleasant in Europe can be punishing here, where a good tar road turns to patched tar after one wet winter and the gravel starts twelve kilometres from the farm gate. We look at ride, ground clearance, seat height for getting in and out without a hand on the roof, tyre sidewall height, boot litres with the parcel shelf in place, and how a cabin cools from forty degrees down.
06
Plenty of people fly into Cape Town and hire for two weeks, and plenty of locals hire something bigger for a family trip. We explain what the daily rate usually hides, the excess and tyre-and-glass question, why a sedan with a lockable boot beats an open-backed hatch at a roadside stop, and what to photograph before you drive away.
07
The quiet end of the work. We sit with your actual week, the one with the Tuesday hospital run and the December trip to Knysna, and we work backwards. Budget in rand, service interval, parts availability in a small town, insurance and tracker requirements, resale after six years, and whether a pre-owned example with a full history beats a new car with a thinner spec.
The show hub
01
We start with your week, not with cars
02
Then a route on a printed floor plan
03
The back row before the driving position
04
Questions with numbers in the answers
05
A quiet lap, then nothing for a week
Photographs
These are the sorts of places the site is written from. No studio shots, and nothing taken with a drone, because neither of us can fly one.
What we actually do
Before a big expo we mark up the hall map: where the saloons sit, where the bakkies and seven-seaters are grouped, which corner has the classic display and where the quiet coffee is. People who walk a planned route see roughly twice as much in the same four hours, and go home with sore feet rather than a headache.
Most visitors leave a hall with six cars in mind and no way to compare them. We give you one page per car with the same eight lines on it: luggage space against your own suitcases, how the rear seat sits for an adult of average build, visibility over the left shoulder, aircon layout, service interval, where the nearest workshop is and what the fuel range looks like on a Karoo leg.
We do not take a cent from any stand, importer or dealer, and we have no cars to move. That means we can say plainly that a glass roof is a bad idea in Upington, or that the second row of a particular sort of coupe-shaped crossover is only honest for two adults. A salesperson cannot say that and keep a job.
One thing we keep saying
People in their twenties buy for the first ten minutes of ownership.
If you drive from Cape Town to George, you are doing roughly four hundred and twenty kilometres on the N2 with one real break, and the car will be the main thing deciding whether you arrive pleasant company or not. That is not about power. It is about the shape of the seat at hour three, whether the cushion is long enough to hold your thighs or stops short behind the knee, how much noise comes off coarse chip tar at a hundred and twenty, whether the aircon can hold a cabin at twenty-two degrees when it is thirty-eight outside, and whether there is a place to put a bottle of water where you can reach it without looking.
People in their twenties buy for the first ten minutes of ownership. By your fifties you are buying for the last hour of a long drive, and the two cars those two tests choose are rarely the same. We would rather talk you into a duller car with a taller tyre sidewall, a full-size spare and a boot that swallows two cases and a cooler box than agree with you about a roofline.
What we do
We are two private motorists, not a dealership and not a broker, and nobody pays us a commission. What follows is what people ask us for most often, with indicative rand figures so you can decide before you phone. If what you need is not on the list, say so and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people.
| Bundle | For whom | Indicative |
|---|---|---|
| Show weekend | Someone attending a big expo for the first time in years, who wants the day to count rather than to be endured. | R1 450 |
| Garden Route preparation | A couple planning a long trip east, in their own car or a hired one, who would rather find the problems in Cape Town than in Storms River. | R2 900 |
| Buying decision | Anyone narrowing a shortlist to one car and sensibly nervous about spending several hundred thousand rand on a hunch. | R4 600 |
All prices are indicative and in rand, quoted per job rather than per hour unless stated.
Questions
No, and that is the whole point of the arrangement. We are paid by the person we are helping and by nobody else. No stand, importer, dealership, insurer or workshop pays us a referral, and we do not hold stock. If we recommend an independent workshop for an inspection, it is because we have used them and we get nothing for saying so.
As an indication, an indoor expo ticket runs somewhere between a hundred and fifty and three hundred rand, children are often cheaper or free, and on-site parking is forty to a hundred and twenty rand depending on how close you want to be. Club displays on a lawn are frequently cheaper, sometimes a donation at the gate. These figures move, so check with the venue.
Worth it for driving position, visibility and the controls you will use every day, not worth it for ride or refinement, because the loop is flat, smooth and slow. If the queue is longer than twenty-five minutes we usually skip it and ask for a proper drive on our own roads instead.
Mostly the unglamorous parts. What the daily rate excludes, what the excess is and whether you can reduce it sensibly, whether tyres and glass are covered, what the agreement says about gravel roads, and which photographs to take at handover so a scratch argument at the end goes your way. Then route notes for the first and last day, because those are the ones people get wrong.
That changes the advice quite a lot, and usually for the better, because the criteria get clearer. Parts availability and the distance to a workshop start outranking almost everything else, gravel becomes a weekly fact rather than an occasional one, and a car sold in large numbers suddenly looks much more attractive than something interesting and rare.
Show halls and long roads
A forty-five minute call the week before an expo changes the whole day, and it costs less than the parking and the tickets together. Phone the Bree Street number during the hours on the contact page, or send a note through the form and tell us which show you are going to and what the car has to do for you.