24 cars blue sky: Sirens of Chrome: The Lovely Ladies of the Detroit Auto Show

Humans of the male variety are innately competitive, particularly when women are involved, so while I was peripatetically experiencing the media preview of the 2013 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Bertel's extensive coverage of the attractive female booth professionals of the Tokyo Auto Salon was on my mind. To be honest, I'm a bit ambivalent about the distracting presence of beautiful women at big car shows. I once asked Andreas Serrano, who does marketing for Maserati of North America, why they have beautiful women on their stand. Serrano, a native Italian, looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Beautiful cars… beautiful women, they go together, no?" "True," I replied, "but you like cars and I like cars. You like women and I like women. If you had to pick one to look at, the car would lose."

I've been working the NAIAS media preview for over a decade now and by now I'm on a first name basis with a lot of the people who work the show. It's always struck me as somewhat ironic that as highly visible as the pretty product specialists and models are, they are sort of invisible in the sense that photographers (and magazine and website publishers) exploit their images but rarely credit them. On the other hand, as you can easily imagine, there are privacy issues for any beautiful woman in the public eye, so I'm not going to give out any names. I do, however, think it's the right thing to do to help these lovely ladies in their careers so I did keep a list of their agents. If you're looking to hire one of these models or product specialists for a photo shoot or event, check with Gail & Rice, Marjorie Krevsky's Productions Plus, iGroup, or JMac.

If you're interested, I've also posted 3D versions of the pics over at Cars In Depth (compatible with most popular 3D formats). To give you a taste, here's "cross eyed" stereo image that you don't need glasses to see in 3D. The images are switched, left to right. Cross your eyes slightly so that your right eye is looking at the left image and vice versa. Then relax your eyes similar to when using a pair of binoculars, and a stable third, 3D image will fuse in the middle of the other two images.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don't worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks – RJS