Geneva is our second motor show of 2003 and incredibly the war against Saddam Hussein hasn't yet started and the car manufacturers of the world are still showing us their weapons of mass seduction.
The first was the North American show in Detroit in early January when we confidently reported from snowy dreary Motown that war was just a few weeks away. So it should have been all done and dusted by last week when the manufacturing bosses and the motoring media met in the pristine Swiss city that prides itself in international diplomacy.
Hardly anybody in Geneva really mentioned the war that's still impending: it seemed diplomatic given that there were so many Americans around. Dr Helmut Panke, BMW chairman, spoke about the 10.000 people directly and indirectly employed by BMW in the US. He said: "it is essential to overcome the tension which now bedevils German and American relations, which by tradition have always been good."
Mark Fields, who heads Ford's Premier Automotive Group - that's Jaguar, Volvo and Aston Martin - admitted to contingency plans for "how we produce and how we ship".
Rick Wagoner, affable worldwide boss of General Motors hoped that the uncertainty would soon be over so that stability and reassurance could return to world markets. It's an aspiration we all share: meanwhile it was time to look at the stalls at Geneva laden with the mass seduction stuff.
More than a decade ago Mazda seduced a lot of buyers with its 323F with pop-up headlamps that seemed so alluring at the time. Women bought the 323F in large numbers: it was described as "the hairdresser's Porsche". The subsequent 323 model was sadly uninspiring but now Mazda is bouncing back, reinvigorated with the success of the 6 and the enthusiastic response to its new four-seater RX-8 rotary-engined sports car. Mazda's Geneva initiative was the MX Sportif, officially a concept car but very much the shape of the new 3 that will take over from the 323. It debuts at the end of this year, built on a platform that will also be used by the new forthcoming S40 Volvo.
Mazda3 will be built in Japan, not Europe. Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the driving but on looks and styling and spaciousness, it oozes appeal, a lower medium family car with more than a suggestion of sportiness. We think it deserves a place on a car-carrying shopping basket and with attractive affordable pricing, it should greatly enhance the continuing Mazda revival.
The Ford Focus C-Max seems a somewhat clumsy-sounding badge. It's a sore point with Ford people that they missed out on the family MPV revolution that was started by the Renault Scenic.
After Scenic, there was the Opel Zafira with a third row of seats and the word is that it, more than the Scenic, put Ford in a tizzy and its engineers looked long and hard at the idea of a similar seven-seater. C-Max is, however, a five-seater and for all the world, it looks like a more stylish, slightly expanded Focus hatchback.
"That's deliberate, we didn't want to give it a distinct MPV profile because it's almost too common now," opined Gunnar Herrmann, the Ford engineer in charge of C-Max. The C in C-Max obviously stands for the segment the car competes in but Ford is also claiming a trinity of key attributes such as comfort, convenience and control. Of course, like all the MPV ilk, there's versatile seating that's removable. With no third row to worry about, there's a lot of extra boot space - about 23 per cent more compared to the regular Focus five-door - while loading is made easy because of a low sill.
But the question has to be asked, is it too late to the party, coming seven years after Renault invented the Scenic? It also might just diminish the appeal of the existing Focus hatchback.
Other new cars making their Geneva debut included the Audi A3, a new city model from Fiat with the ludicrous name of Gingo, the Daewoo Nubira, the Lexus RX-300, the Mercedes-Benz CLK cabriolet, the Mitsubishi Outlander, the Nissan 350Z, the Opel Signum (described as a business class derivative of the Vectra), the Peugeot 307cc or coupe cabriolet, the Renault Megane II cabriolet, the Saab 9-3 convertible, the Toyota Avensis and the Volkswagen Touran.
But much of the excitement of a show is in the concepts, the shape of things to come. Best of show here had to be the radical all-wheel-drive car that will be the Subaru Impreza in 2005. Subaru has a great reputation for rallying and durability: its weakness is styling. The concept shows a brave new face and outrageous spoilers and scoops are abandoned.
Volvo showed its V90 luxury estate, made environmentally acceptable because it will be hybrid, running on half petrol and half electric power. Opel's GTC concept was also very much a star of the show and the sporty compact with three-doors and a coupé-like appearance is likely to resemble a future Astra three-door hatchback. A new Astra range begins appearing in the spring of 2004.
Talking points at the show included the future of Fiat, Saab's poor sales and General Motors expanded influence with the acquisition of Daewoo.
GM has a 20 per cent stake in the troubled Italian carmaker but Rick Wagoner wasn't responding to speculative questions. Right how, Fiat and GM were in the parts sharing business and that was money-saving and end of story!
On the other topics, he said Saab had to expand production and it needed a more comprehensive product line-up.
Daewoo would bring car-owning affordability to masses in Asia, especially China.
Geneva salon works with the sort of precision and efficiency that we expect from the Swiss. The neat layout symbolises just who controls what in the global auto industry.
Thus, the big Ford stand is adjacent to Jaguar, Aston Martin, Volvo and Mazda, while the extensive Opel exhibit is alongside Saab and Daewoo. Clustered around Volkswagen, are Seat and Skoda as well as Audi.
Fiat with Alfa Romeo and Lancia associates stand alone. Where will they be in the Geneva set-up in 2004? Will they be part of GM's expanded family? Getting the answer is nearly as difficult as determining when the war is going to start.