MotorEx 2022: This Is Australia

I lost count of how many times MotorEx was postponed in the past two years. After my first time at the show back in 2019, I was eagerly waiting for its next instalment. It was a festival of custom motoring, filled to the brim of quality builds and details that left me awestruck.​

​Yet, it was still typically Australian, with Aussie business vendors, sponsors and builders all at the centre of MotorEx.

SEMA and Tokyo Auto Salon; even with their large international influences and connections are mass presentations of the North American and Japanese car scenes.

MotorEx then, is Australia’s exhibition of our slice of car culture. From our home-built muscle cars, to being inspired by other countries way of car modification and bringing it here.

A simple way to explore this further is by looking at Ford and Holden. Ford is an American company, and Holden was owned by GM, another American brand. Yet both emblems time in Australia would be spent building cars that were quintessentially Australian and wouldn’t work being sold anywhere else. They were our cars, unique to anything that came out of Europe, Japan and those made by the kingpins in America.

​Even with the expiration of Australia’s homegrown car industry, its fruits live on. 

The mighty Barra is a dark horse in the world of six-cylinder warcraft. And the engines built by Holden engineers have been dropped into any car us Aussies can get our hands on. These engines also have a huge aftermarket support from the motherland, even after their discontinuation. 

The Australian builds that filled the halls of the Melbourne Showgrounds are a testament to those talented mechanics and fabricators who worked their magic, whilst also representing Aussie made metal with incredible quality and the best way possible to the rest of the world.

Of course, there are a collection of cars from over the ocean that we have welcomed into the Aussie family. We love our own utes, but we greeted larger foreign utes like the Toyota Hilux and Nissan Navara with open arms.

And cars like the Mitsubishi Magna and Mirage are sometimes just as bogan as our  Commodores and Falcons.

Although we don’t quite have such a large obsession with the RX platform as our friends in New Zealand, us Aussies can build quite a decent classic buzzing Mazda too.

It would be rude not to mention the American automobiles that our home car culture has been inspired by too. Hot Rods, American Muscle, Lowriders and almost everything in between has been imported from the US of A. We have joined the bandwagon, and enjoyed these styles as much as the Americans have.

​We embrace every kind of motorsport known to man. From drifting to drag racing to sprint cars and everything in between, we’ll have a crack at all of it. 

​But to burst the rest of the world’s bubble for a moment, Australia is the undisputed king of burnouts, don’t bother arguing or even trying to compete!

Like SEMA and Tokyo Auto Salon, which are the epicentres of two massive worlds in car culture, MotorEx is Australia’s demonstration of how we do things down under. The best builds and the largest portrayal of the growth and trends in Australian car culture.

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