A question. Aside from being car manufacturers, what do Alfa Romeo, Alpine, Aston Martin, Audi, Bentley, BMW, Citroen, Ferrari, Fiat, Ford, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar, Kia, Lamborghini, Land Rover, Lexus, Lotus, Maserati, Mazda, McLaren, Mercedes-Benz, Mini, Morgan, Nissan, Peugeot, Polestar, Porsche, Rolls-Royce, Seat, Skoda, Tesla, Toyota, Vauxhall, Volkswagen and Volvo all have in common? You guessed it, not one of them will have an official presence at the 2024 Geneva Motor Show in early March.

To someone who, in most years of his three-and-a-half decade career, had gone to Geneva every March because it was the one show at which almost everyone of any importance was near guaranteed to turn up, this is a staggering turn of events.

Instead the halls will be, for want of a better word, ‘filled’ by companies such as Assura, Auto-i-DAT, Beeway, Caresoft Global, Classics Legends Motor, ErreErre Fuoriseries, Lazareth, Martin Engler, Microlino, Race World, Shenzer, Silence, Swiss Racing Lab and Totem Automobili. And don’t worry, because I haven’t either.

Names you will have heard of include Renault and its Dacia offshoot, MG Motor, Isuzu and Pininfarina, while names you may well have heard of include BYD, Kimera, Lucid and that’s about it.

It is an astonishing fall for what was always been the most prestigious and important motor show on the calendar, despite the fact that this will be the first in five years. So what happened?

What the organisers are discovering is that Covid did not happen in a bubble – an event that came and went. In an unfathomable number of ways, it changed the way the world did all sorts of things, a certain sort of business among them. Because, unlike the Geneva International Motor Show (to give it its full name), car manufacturers could not just put themselves into a state of suspended animation until the coast was clear. They had to find a way of continuing to show the world their wares.

So they did. I spoke to a few people I know well in the industry and they all said remarkably similar things. They held their own gatherings, rather than attending a mass gathering. And what they discovered was it allowed them to tailor their events and messaging to precisely their own requirements and to not compete with all their rivals for every column inch going. One more thing: doing it that way saved money, and wildly so once the returns were factored in. On a cost/benefit basis, this conventional motor show simply no longer made sense to the biggest, most famous, longest established car brands.

But is there a way back? There is clear irony in the way the stuffy old motor show is now being taken over by hungry young start-ups as the traditional business walks away, but is that simply because in their absence it’s a great way to get your little known name into the headlines? Or perhaps the price of a stand is not what it once was? Or, probably, both. I don’t know, but my long held belief that this format for showing cars to the world, invented a century or more ago, is in a state of terminal decline. All Covid has really achieved is to accelerate an already inevitable process.