Less than a month before the 41st Tokyo Motor Show opens its doors to the members of the press and the public alike, and the last major foreign automaker that was planning to take part at the car show, South Korea's Hyundai Motors, decided to drop out from the event, according to the show's organizers.
If you take a look at the list of the participating brands, you'll see that aside from eight domestic automakers - Subaru, Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi, Mazda, Daihatsu, Nissan and Suzuki, the only foreign carmakers that will have a booth at this year's Tokyo Motor Show are Germany's Alpina that builds special edition versions of BMW cars and Britain's Lotus! Not much of an International show...
Toyokazu Ishida, manager of the international exhibition for the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association (JAMA) told Automotive News that the South Korean maker announced its plans to cancel its participation just last Friday, September 25. "Hyundai called last week and orally confirmed their intent to cancel. It's unbelievable," Ishida was quoted as saying.
JAMA officials said that Hyundai has yet to send a written confirmation of its decision to pull out of the show. According to JAMA, the South Korean automaker has already paid 10.9 million ($122,000) in nonrefundable fees for a 4,300-square-foot exhibit at the Show.
Earlier this year, JAMA announced that due to the weakened interest in the event, the overall exhibition space will be about half the size of the previous show at 22,877 sqm (vs 44,587 sqm in 2007). The organizers also decided to shorten the even by four days and as such, the 2009 Tokyo Motor Show will be held for a period of 13 days (instead of 17) from October 23 to November 4, 2009.
Among the cars that are expected to make their debut at the 2009 Tokyo show are the production version of the Lexus LF-A V10 supercar and a new Subaru Justy.
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