GqeberhaEastern Capehalls
This is a diary kept by people who walk exhibition floors in Nelson Mandela Bay and drive home afterwards with sore feet and a full notebook. It is for drivers past forty-five who want seat height, boot litres and service intervals rather than applause.
Why a diary
A motor show is a building full of lighting rigs, and lighting flatters everything. The only way to get past that is to stand in the same hall for four hours, sit in the seats twice, open the boots, crawl under the display ramps where the staff let you, and then write it down in the car park before the impression fades. That is the whole method, and it is unglamorous.
Gqeberha gives us a good vantage point. The city has halls in Central and Summerstrand that take two hundred to six hundred cars between them, the municipal showgrounds take the bigger club gatherings, and within three hours of driving there are coastal lawn events along the R72 and farm-shed displays up towards Kirkwood and Paterson. A reader in Walmer can get to most of them and be home for supper.
We write for a specific person: someone who has owned six or seven cars, who is now choosing one that must still be comfortable at two hundred and forty kilometres in a day, and who has stopped caring which stand has the loudest sound system. If you want lap times, there are better sites.
What the diary covers
The emphasis here is halls and show floors, because that is what Gqeberha offers and what we know best. The other six subjects are not filler; they are what readers write in about once a show has put an idea in their head.
01
Indoor shows in the Bay and the smaller halls inland, judged on practical things: aisle width, where the seats are, whether the aircon copes on a still afternoon, and how long the queue for a demonstration drive actually runs.
02
Lawn events on the coast, club displays on hard standing, and the quiet judging categories that reward correct fasteners and a dry boot floor. We explain what a judge's clipboard contains so a visitor can read a class without asking.
03
Getting to and from shows: the R72 through Bathurst and Port Alfred, the N2 west over the Van Stadens gorge towards the Garden Route, the N10 and the Olifantskop climb, and the R335 up to Addo when the display is at a farm shed.
04
Large saloons, big estates and the heavy seven-seaters that show up on stands with a six-figure price card. We report back on ride quality over patched tar, rear seat room for an adult, and what a service costs out here, away from the main dealer belt.
05
Comfort in the Eastern Cape sense: a seat that holds you for three hours, a suspension that does not crash into a pothole edge, an aircon that pulls the cabin down while you crawl out of a hall car park, and tyres you can replace in Korsten on a Saturday.
06
Short-term hire as a long test drive and as show transport. Daily rates, excess levels, tracker and border conditions, and the quiet detail about who pays for a tyre cut on gravel on the way to a farm display.
07
The part that happens after the show, when the brochure is on the kitchen table. We work through boot litres against your actual luggage, service intervals against your yearly kilometres, and the cost of the first four years of tyres and brakes.
Every entry
Entries written after the walk, in the car park or at the kitchen table that evening. Halls in Nelson Mandela Bay, lawns along the coast, and the drives that get us to both.
Every entry
A full hall in the Bay puts roughly eleven kilometres of aisle in front of you across two days. Most visitors walk six of those kilometres twice and miss the stands they came for. This entry is the order we use.
Read this entryFind out which classes are running before judging what you are looking at.
Allow three to three and a half hours each way, not the arithmetic answer.
Spend the first ninety seconds on seat setting, parked, before you move.
Lumbar range and cushion length matter more than seat heating or massage.
Two days of hire, R1 100 to R3 000 indicative, before a six-figure purchase.
New entries follow the show calendar rather than a publishing schedule, so the gaps are honest. If a hall was quiet or the display was thin, we say so instead of padding the page.
From the notebook
Photographs taken on the days the entries were written. No stands paid for a place in this gallery, and none of them were consulted about it.
Three habits
We collect the hall plan at the gate and mark the stands worth a slow pass, the ones worth thirty seconds, and the catering corner with real chairs. Four hours in a hall goes fast if you walk it in the order the organisers laid out instead of the order that suits your knees.
Every car we sit in gets the same four checks: thigh support under the knee, lumbar adjustment range, how far the seat drops for a tall driver, and what the boot swallows with the parcel shelf in place. Numbers go in the notebook in litres and centimetres.
An impression formed in a hall is worth very little until the same shape has been driven over the Van Stadens crossing in a side wind. Where we can borrow or hire the car afterwards, the entry says so plainly, and where we could not, it says that too.
One opinion we repeat
Every hall in the country uses the same trick: cool white light above, warm light at the sills, a polished floor to double the paintwork, and the cars raised just enough that you look slightly up at them. It works on everybody, including us, and the only defence is a measurement. A tape measure, a notebook and the discipline to sit in the car twice will undo most of the effect.
The second defence is time. Come back to the same stand two hours later, after you have seen forty other cars, and see whether it still interests you. Readers who do that reliably end up with a shorter shortlist and a calmer decision, and the ones who buy on the first lap tend to write to us about the seat six months afterwards.
Rate card
All prices are indicative and quoted in rand, before any travel outside the metro. We work for the person reading, not for a stand, and nothing on this card can be bought by an exhibitor.
01
R2 400 indicative
A couple attending one indoor show in the Bay with a purchase in mind within the next few months.
02
R4 300 indicative
Readers driving out to a coastal display who want the route and the event handled as one piece of planning.
03
R7 800 indicative
Someone who saw a car at a show and intends to buy within the season, and wants the whole decision checked.
Travel beyond the metro is charged at R5.20 a kilometre indicative, from Parliament Street and back. Work at a lawn event on the R72 therefore usually carries a travel line; we quote it before we start, never after.
Rate cardStreet parking around Parliament Street and the surrounding blocks fills by half past nine on a Saturday. The secured lots nearby run R30 to R60 for the day on indicative rates, which is money well spent if you are coming out after dark. On a weekday morning you can usually park within three hundred metres of the door.
Indoor halls generally are: the floors are flat, the aisles at the main venues run wide enough for a chair, and the accessible toilets are marked on the hall plan. Lawn events are harder, because grass and a chair do not get on, and after rain the parking field can be the worst part of the day. Phone the venue beforehand and ask about the hard standing.
The drive itself is six to ten minutes on a fixed loop. The queue is the variable: around forty minutes on a busy Saturday afternoon in our notes, and under ten on a Friday morning. You will need a valid licence at the desk and they will photograph it.
No. Nothing on the rate card can be bought by a stand, a club or a dealer, and we do not run advertising on the site. That is the main reason the entries can say a display was thin.
Yes, by phone and in writing for the planning work. Accompanied work carries a travel line of R5.20 a kilometre indicative from Parliament Street, so a reader in Makhanda or Jeffreys Bay should expect that to appear on the quote before anything starts.
Around R980 all in for a day at an indoor show in the Bay: entry for two, parking, a meal and fuel from the suburbs. A coastal lawn day on the R72 runs closer to R2 100 once the round trip fuel and a sit-down lunch are counted.
Send us the show and what you are weighing up, and we will tell you plainly whether it is worth your Saturday or whether you should wait for the next one. That answer is free, and it has saved a few readers a long drive.
Write to us