Packed with families, car shoppers, and car enthusiasts, the biggest auto show in the Midwest came back to life at McCormick Place this weekend. Organizers said ticket sales were up 40% from last year.
Darrin Brown, 55, visited the car show from Montgomery in the Western Suburbs to look at the electric vehicles. The telecommunications data worker said he drives all over the continent for his work and has to fill his gas tank three to four times a week. He says that he has put 253,000 miles on his Town & Country Chrysler over the last seven years.
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[ Chicago Auto Show goes electric in first major McCormick Place event since omicron ]
Brown said he was thinking about getting into an electric vehicle because of the impact on the environment. Now, he is eyeing the Chrysler Pacifica for his next car.
Over at the BMW electric vehicle test track, 33-year-old supply chain specialist Tim Wissel said he was also in the market to buy an electric vehicle. Though he works from home, Wissel said he used to drive long distances for his job and put nearly 100,000 miles on his Toyota Prius over the course of four years.
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Wissel, of Rolling Meadows, said he is looking forward to purchasing the iX but not at the moment. Wissel said he wants to buy the car after a couple of years and wait for new upgrades.
Vinita Mandi, who was visiting from New Jersey with her friend, Dujitcha Kasipuram, from Detroit, said she has been getting into Formula One racing. She said she appreciated that the auto show catered to all ages, including video games and toy cars for children.
Mandi said she liked the car show because even though it can have “the feeling of a dealership,” it didn’t have the pressure of a car salesperson who wants to sell you a car right then and there. She said she also was interested in learning more about the amenities and the pastel colors that cars come in that aren’t normally at a regular dealership.
Kasipuram, who grew up with family members working for Ford, said the auto show brings back memories of coming to the shows with her dad when she was in middle school.
She also said that while Chicago’s car show is bigger, Detroit’s car shows have more of a hometown feeling because of the jobs the car industry brings to the city.,
Mandi and Kasipuram were able to ride along on an obstacle track that tested the off-road readiness of the Ford Bronco. One of the track’s obstacles had a sharp 40-degree incline known as “Bronco Mountain,” which Kasipuram likened to a “roller coaster, but from a car’s perspective.”
[ Chicago will transform the Grant Park area into the first-ever NASCAR street race in 2023. ]
The NASCAR booth included a baby blue Ford Mustang, which is going to be the pace car for its upcoming debut street race in Grant Park, said senior account executive Josh Barnhill. He said there was a lot of interest on the first day of the car show, and he ran out of the 10,000 pamphlets he brought to the booth.
Barnhill said he told car show patrons who were skeptical about a race downtown that NASCAR is following the blueprints of the yearly music festival Lollapalooza. He said the streets that will be closed will be similar, and NASCAR will help the city upgrade streets where the cars will be racing.
