The Paris Motor Show has installed 40 soundproofed crying rooms across the Porte de Versailles exhibition center, complete with chaise lounges, boxes of tissues and dimmed lighting, after organizers concluded that the event's purpose is no longer displaying vehicles but producing emotional breakdowns among visitors.
Managing director María Sánchez Grela announced the new policy during a walkthrough of the halls, where every Mercedes CLA display now includes a trained weeping coach who guides attendees through a 20-minute grief cycle before allowing them to touch the door handles. «We have moved beyond the era of horsepower and range figures,» she told assembled journalists. «A car that does not make a grown man sob into his own scarf has failed its mission.»
The show's floor plan has been redrawn around the crying rooms, with the largest unit, a 300-square-meter pavilion styled like a rain-soaked Parisian street at dusk, reserved for the Chinese manufacturers who have reportedly hired professional mourners to wail in harmony beneath their electric SUVs. Traditional European brands have responded by doubling the wattage of their ambient lighting and commissioning original orchestral scores that swell precisely as visitors approach the hood ornament.
Ticket prices now include a mandatory pre-visit sensitivity seminar, and the reduced-rate afternoon entry has been renamed the «emotional matinee,» during which staff dim the hall lights and play slow piano music over the public address system. The show closes Sunday with a group catharsis session in Hall 4, where visitors will be encouraged to release their feelings about the internal combustion engine one final time before the doors shut.