2025 Los Angeles Auto Show Recap — Automobility In Action

Soon after the sounds of generic rock made sure no auto-show attendee was in danger of oversleeping, I heard a different unmistakable sound: The thump-thump/chop-chop of helicopter blades. It wasn’t even 8:30 yet. I looked up in time to see an LA County PD helicopter raising to my hotel-room window 30 floors above the street, kitty corner from the Los Angeles Convention Center. It looked so close that I could reach out and touch it. It was like something out of a Lethal Weapon flick. The chopper shot southwest, circled, and came back as I tracked it with the Hollywood sign in the background. I later found out it was parked just below my room, as part of demos for the show.

Welcome to Automobility LA.

Auto shows are supposed to be about cars, of course, but have long hosted aircraft and military vehicles and the like. So it’s no surprise the local county cops were part of the event. I did have to wonder, though — with just a few unveils on tap, was what is often a sideshow going to be the main event?

I needed not fret. Yes, the press conference schedule was light — and Jeep chose to show the Recon two nights before the media day, before many media (myself included) were even in town. That left Kia, Lucid, and Hyundai to drive the show — Volkswagen had a presser but wasn’t showing new product.

But as is often the case, an apparently slow show can turn quite busy.

I got time with Sony’s Afeela (more to come on that) and finally saw Slate’s prototype truck upfront. Brand presence was — well, a little better than it has been lately, but there were some notable absences, as well as a few brands stuffed into sadly small spots.

I’ve said before that auto-show media days are going to be a shell of what they once were, thanks to OEMs realizing they do a Zoom webinar at any point in the year and command media attention for a day or two, instead of for an hour or two. But media days aren’t dead yet — and I think LA and New York will remain strong, in part because there are so many non-car media outlets located in each town — and while there was no need to fight for a seat in the media room, there was plenty to do. I hope that’s a good sign — vibes are hard to measure.

Quick takes on the major unveils and other interesting cars I saw:

• Jeep’s Recon is intriguing. It looks cool and offers the Jeep experience. But the numbers worry me — not to mention that there’s no jerry can for electricity. Does Jeep have some sort of solution for portable charging? Or is the Recon going to be better suited to getting you the trailhead than over the Rubicon? I can’t wait to drive it and find out.
• Lucid’s Gravity Touring is going to be a perfect foil for Tesla, if it drives well. I’ve driven an Air and liked it, but I’ve not yet piloted a Gravity. Offering a cheaper entrant to the luxury EV SUV segment is a solid move from a small brand.
• I said that the Hyundai Crater Concept may just be a design/feature preview and not preview a future model, but I am wavering on that — maybe it will turn into a production vehicle. Either way, it looked awesome up close and was the one model I wanted to drive. I hope Hyundai does build it, even if it will have to be toned down and the doors won’t be suicide style.
• Kia’s Telluride seems to be making subtle improvements to an already good vehicle. The new grille on the X-Pro trim is divisive, though.
• I have more to come on Sony’s Afeela joint venture with Honda, but my initial take, after seeing the car decked out in USC colors at a darkened gallery space in Beverly Hills, is that it could serve as a Tesla Model 3 and Lucid Air fighter, but will it sell once the first adapters are done snapping them up? The gallery space, by the way, at Canon and Santa Monica will be the showroom for Sony.
• Slate’s small pickup is right-sized, and it reminds of the old Mitsubishis that my parents used for auto-parts deliveries in the late ’80s when they ran their store. It seems like it will be a pretty cool vehicle for fleets. I give the company credit — one of the executives, I didn’t catch which one, was willing to say, in front of assembled media, that building a new is “really f—ing hard.” It is, that’s absolutely true. And it was nice to hear a start-up executive admit that reality instead of puffing out his chest and spewing bravado and bulls–t. The company claims that even with the challenges it faces, the truck should be on the road in a year.
• Finally, while the OEM presence seemed a tad stronger than it has been in these early post-COVID years, there were still some missing. I don’t think Lexus had a presence, unless it was folded into Toyota. Cadillac, GMC, and Buick had a few cars stuffed into a corner along the walkway between exhibit halls. I spotted an Acura PR person at Honda’s booth, but not sure I saw any actual Acuras. Scout was there, albeit outside. Lincoln, Maserati, and Alfa Romeo had presence but once again most of the luxury makes, big and small, weren’t there or were represented by dealers — a la Porsche and its stand that was managed by Porsche Downtown LA. Sparq AI took over the side space that’s used for classic cars — though, fear not, fans of the really cool stuff. Sparq had fewer cars than Galpin brought in years past, but it still had a few, including a McLaren F1, a Honda NSX, and some F1 and Indy cars.

As you’ve seen on this site since Thursday and will see through the end of this short holiday week, there was plenty of stuff to see, photograph, and write about in LA. An auto-show is more than just the number of new cars unveiled. The industry is still in turmoil, as it almost always is. Tariffs, high ATPs, penny-pinched customers, constant changes to the EV adoption timeline, constant changes to the regulatory environment, the possible impact of autonomous vehicles, wrangling over fuel-economy standards and EV tax credits — it’s a wild time to be covering this industry.

But even if uncertainty can lead to stress for those of us who care about cars, I walked away from LA feeling good, and I swear it wasn’t because of SoCal sunshine. There’s still hard work being done to get some good stuff to market.

We’ll see if that momentum carries forward and turns the Detroit show around — last year’s media day was a ghost town.