SEMA 2007
Confessions of a First Timer

I was asked by the TDR to cover the SEMA show for the magazine and the website. This being my first time at the event, I have to say it was overwhelming. I've seen it on TV shows and in magazines, so I thought I was prepared. But the sheer magnitude of the event is beyond what you could possibly envision. It's simply enormous!

I spent three days walking through the show and still was unable to see everything. In addition to completely filling the Las Vegas Convention Center (all three halls, plus a couple parking lots and several huge outdoor tents), I was also told that there was another 40% in the Sands hotel which I didn't see at all! Each day I walked until I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to make it back to my car. Thank God for ibuprofren!

Throughout the event one thing that kept coming to mind was whether it was possible that the automotive aftermarket industry could possibly be THIS big? According to SEMA's information it's a $36.7 billion industry and more than 2,000 companies exhibit with over 125,000 attendees. There is over 1 million square feet of exhibition space and it's packed! On the website I've put up some video that I shot to try to give you a taste of it, but as I said it's impossible to convey the show's enormity.

One thing that disappointed me was Dodge and Cummins' lack of involvement in the diesel arena at the event. I attended a number of seminar's regarding the diesel aftermarket industry and every one of them were packed full of interested vendors. There is a lot of excitement in the industry and unfortunately Dodge and Cummins were almost completely absent. There were no diesel products in the Dodge display that I could find. Meanwhile GM and Ford both had a number of diesel powered vehicles featured. In addition GM trucks greatly outnumbered Dodge's in all of the other displays. I don't understand why Dodge isn't more involved.

In the picture gallery I've included pictures of every Dodge Ram that I could find , I missed some. There are also a few pictures of products that I found that are "out there"!

There was plenty of four wheeled eye candy (especially in the wheel and tire section) with exotic sports cars all over the place. I think Lamborghini's entire production run makes it to the SEMA show. It seemed like you ran into one every 10 booths or so! A couple of cars that really stood out to me were from Classic Reflection coachworks (http://www.crcoachworks.com) and were C5 Corvettes made to look like modern versions of the 1962 vettes - they were stunning!! I've included pictures of them as well as some of the other cars that stood out to me in the gallery.

Toyota had on display a 1 ton dually diesel project vehicle on 22.5" wheels and tires. It had an 8.0 Liter Hino inline six-cylinder diesel engine, and an Eaton five speed manual transmission - both from medium duty applications. While Toyota says the rear end is from a medium duty application it looked pretty small compared to the big three offerings to me. The front end was a very weak looking IFS setup.

A couple of the areas amazed me as to their size and the sheer number of like products. The Mobile Electronics section had booth after booth of LCD screens - literally thousands of them! Are that many people really watching video in their cars,? With so many competitors to choose from, how any of those vendors hope to capture business is beyond me.

The other section was the wheel and tire section. It was the largest area of the show and it was mind boggling how many different wheels there were. There were thousands of different styles of wheels. Some of the most ridiculous products I saw were in this section. The size of some of the wheels is getting downright ridiculous with there being at least one 42" wheel - yes, that's correct, 42 inches! There were also LCD wheels that allowed you to display whatever you wanted in your wheel as you were cruising down the road. I also saw several acrylic wheels where it looked like the rim was just floating in space. I've included pictures of some of these in the picture gallery.

I looked at so many products over the last three days that it's hard to recall any of them right now. There were several companies selling rail systems for your bed to help organize cargo which looked better than ones I'd seen in the past. Another product that stands out in my mind was Intellistick (http://www.intellistick.com) which is a device for real time oil monitoring. I'm going to try to get them to do a write up for the magazine to get more information on that. That's about all I can recall that stand out right now but if I come up with more I'll add them before it hits the magazine.

Submitted by: Steve St.Laurent, TDR Webmaster