Humungous Highlights of Grand 2022 SEMA Show, Another Great Success

W&HM - Wheels and Heels Magazine / In-Person Coverage, Reports and Photography by Py Pai

# 2022 SEMA Show, The Gigantic Auto Aftermarket and Specialty Tools Show

The SEMA show has been a big staple of our magazine event coverage for more than a decade. It's the biggest show in many measures, in the world, in the industry as well as in our magazine history. The tremendous amount of show space at the Las Vegas Convention Center housed more than 5000 exhibitors and likely more than 100K attendees. It's a huge show and an exhausting one too. However, we totally enjoyed the show and brought you back the many highlight products, companies, and definitely show promotions and car showcase.

The opening day weather was gentle, warm, and perfectly bright and sunny for the first day, and then windy and chilly the next day, and on the third day, it's getting mixed sentiments. It literally changed from the sunny Summer weather to unsettled Fall, and then to pre-Winter chilly weather in the Las Vegas style.

The SEMA show has the following main categories across automobile-related aftermarket products and services:

Business Services
Collision Repair & Refinish
Global Tire Expo
Hot Road Alley
Mobile Electronics & Technology
OEM
Powersports & Utility Vehicles
Racing & Performance
Restoration Market Place
Restyling & Care Care Accessories
Tools & Equipment
Trucks
SUVs & Off-Road
Wheels & Accessories

Besides these categories and many SEMA education sessions and panels and awards, there were other exciting activities and displays all around, including many show cars, trucks, hotrods, drag race cars, plus drifting showcases, automobile arts, battle of the builders, overland, electrical vehicle, and TV interviews, and others.

We knew that the time allocated for the coverage was never enough, so we concentrated on the key aspects of the magazine's themes and covered the consistent subjects and aspects of the show.

The Las Vegas Convention Center exhibit halls are epic and huge. They were all occupied across the South (upper, lower), Central, North hall, and the still shiny new West hall, plus many pavilions and lots around these vast buildings. The amount of pure floor space is just staggering, and the super majority of it was taken by booths, equipment, cars, and people's feet, standing or walking.

Some pre-show murmurs are about some car manufacturers pulling out of the show this year. However, it seemed to not be a problem at all. The original Ford booth space was taken up by Toyota with varying new cars and Overlanding vehicles. They brought a bright and outdoorsy vibe to the show.

Even though we did not get the exact number of attendees this year, we have witnessed a pretty strong showing of people. Especially during the first day, we saw the Central Hall with elbow-to-elbow traffic filling the entire show walkways. It made us feel that it's coming back to the pre-pandemic level of attendance.

Also, there were many languages heard throughout the show. Attendees from other countries have generated a huge presence at the SEMA show. The show attracted not just foot traffic, but also the buyers' eyes and signatures, as well as the press's megaphones media platforms.

# SEMA Outlandish Vendor Show Cars

SEMA is no shortage of show cars, period. This is the place and event for showing off highly articulated vehicles. It's a kaleidoscope of American hot rods, European luxury, JDM racing, showy trucks, off-roads, as well as many other types of vehicles.

One would see the mirror-finished highly polished cars that leave no room for imperfection, as the results of love and labor for the craft and art. Under the hood, many cars have their own levels of modifications or enhancements. They are not competing against each other, but a great complement from all walks or should we say all wheels of cars.

In particular, we interviewed Bear Dellinger, a prominent car builder, model, and spokesperson, on Garret Motion's showcase Ford Mustang: "What's up guys? This is Bear Dellinger at Garrett Motion at SEMA 2022. We have our beautiful booth car right behind us. It's the Ford 1965 Mustang. This is a thousand-horsepower vehicle. It's a full circuit car, it's a 430 Aluminum cubic inch block with our G35-900 twin turbo setup. So this is a beast of a car and it's done so nicely. Make sure to go check out all the rest of our builds at Garrett Advancing Motion."

# Overland Experience Strong

Over the last several years, Overlanding has been getting popular, especially with the pandemic. People mostly could not travel overseas or fly easily as used to. The best they could do was to drive around the vast country to different National / State Parks, and natural spots.

Overlanding has become a hot topic ever since the pandemic, and now many companies offer their technologies and products to enhance outdoor motor travel experiences. There were many booths set up at the Overland Section at this year's SEMA show.

We met the Canadian company Off Grid Trailers sales director, Denny, and learned so much about the overland and off-grid lifestyle. Through our conversation, we gathered that they produce high-quality trailers and put them through rigorous tests, to international standards. There are various regional conditions that may have different requirements. This goes beyond the power plug types, but also to things like dust types and grain sizes. We learned that Australia is the leader of the overland lifestyle due to its geographical composition. Also, the Arizona dust is the finest that requires finer filtration systems than usual. They also often deliver their trailers to various shopping mall parking lot due to local street restrictions. This often created a mini event in that people gathered around to see a wrapped trailer being hauled in and dropped for pick up. There were quite some fun stories Denny told us that made us appreciate the outdoor lifestyle more.

# The SEMA Electrified Section Grown Tremendously

In the past, the SEMA Electrified Showcase area was more simply classic cars converted to the motor-based drive system. However, this year, the 2022 SEMA show has highly charged the SEMA Electrified Showcase with many vendors showing off their consumer-level electric cars (EVs) and concept ones.

The showcase space was greatly expanded, and many stylish EVs were lined up for all types of uses. This signifies the coming age of EVs and the unavoidable future lying ahead of us.

# Car Art Section Bringing Art-aware to Hardware

There is a full row of art dealers that showcased many works of art related to automobiles and motorsports. It's an automobile art collectible wonderland.

# Highly Anticipated Battle of the Builders

There are so many highly modified and detailed builder cars in the Battle of the Builders section. Many were not only shiny overall, but also uniquely modified which showed a great investment of effort and time into these works of art. There were many cars that were worth a good amount of time to really inspect, appreciate, and learn from them. These are the professionals of the professionals.

# Vrooms and Booms of Drifting Demos

Optima put up great shows doing drifting demos at early 9 am when the show started. Also at the main entrance parking lot, converted into an exhibitor booth and drifting arena, also had eardrum vibrating drifting demos and experiences.

These stunts were not just making noises. They were really getting out there and making people feel their presence. At the Optima drifting stunts, the cars were so close to the K-rails and fences, that each time a drifting car drifted by, smoke and rubber debris would fly right into the audience's faces. There is no escape from it as they generated so much smoke or rubber particles from their fierce and fearless stunts that just totally surrounded the bystanders. It's just a totally immersive spectator experience!

# 2022 SEMA Show a Huge and Incredible Show and a Great Success!

This year's SEMA show has a feel of a full return to the normal gigantic SEAM show that it always has been. Even though the participating vendor composition has changed, it's always the case anyway. It's actually refreshing to see different companies at different locations each year. It makes SEMA show fresh and interesting.

Throughout the exhausting but exciting multi-day coverage, we have learned new products and information, meet so many good friends and new friends, as well as getting to see amazing cars in various mod levels and finishes.

As always for SEMA, there were always too many things to see, too many sessions to attend, and so many models to cover. We totally love it! We already look forward to the next year's event.

We will continue to provide much more coverage of individual vehicles that we thought to be awesome to bring back to you. Please come back and click on the link here (or https://cars.wheelsandheelsmag.com/search?q=sema+2022) to see more coverage in the future!