Last weekend I spent a few hours at the Geneva Motor Show. For a number of years, it was an annual pilgrimage for me, but it’s been a year or two since the last time I went. I hadn’t planned to do a post about this, but I saw a few things that I thought were interesting enough to share.

Overall I didn’t notice many changes at the show. The hall was quite crowded on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I thought there was less of a throng downstairs around the professional stands for accessories and tools than in years past, but PalExpo seems to have changed the traffic flow, so it was difficult to tell if there were fewer people there or if they were just entering the hall at a different place.

I had expected to see some interesting tech following the press from this year’s CES where automotive solutions were one of the big stories of the show. Although some of that technology was on display, it was relegated to a supporting role.

I had a chance to finally see and sit in a Tesla.

One of the booth hosts told us it takes a full 8 hours to charge the battery for an autonomy of 500km. He also said there are already 500 Teslas on the roads here in Switzerland. Things apparently come in 500’s with Tesla. I didn’t take a picture, but the interior was spacious and the dashboard is an LCD. The console is a generous touch screen, which seems to be about A4 paper sized. The screen was crisp and should be an excellent display for maps and navigation.

Citroën used a similar approach for the interior design of the Cactus (what a weird name for a car), but this affordable model car has a minimalist interior that just seemed cheap.

Nothing more than a tablet mounted on the console. I’d almost rather just have a docking station where I could put my own tablet running the Cactus app. Note too the big buttons for Drive, Reverse and Neutral. I didn’t ask how you put the thing in PARK.

The Cactus got a lot of floor space so I suppose they’re expecting this to appeal to a big market.

They even had an adventure version on display, but this one is just a concept.

Finally, the most interesting thing I saw was another concept, the EDAG Genesis. This is a 3D printed sculpture of a one-man vehicle.

I thought it was a stunning look at how additive manufacturing technology could bring new ideas to automotive design. Imagine, if one day, people can 3D print their own cars. What will we see at the Geneva Motor Show then?