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Carmakers don't often display crashed vehicles on their motor show stands. But Ford went to town at the New York show with a mangled Taurus saloon that had been converted into an interactive display.

The Ford Taurus is a mainstream saloon of the type that's the backbone of the US car market. It's about the size of a current Passat and has the look of the last-generation Mondeo. Ford says it is the 'safest large car in America'.

The white car on display had been put through the US industry standard 35mph '40 percent' offset frontal crash. That mimics a typical head-on collision where at least one driver manages to steer away from the oncoming car. But that makes things worse, because the crash force is then mostly concentrated on one corner.

New York is grey, wet and under a cloud. After yesterday’s slashing of the base interest rate, Wall Street stocks jumped, but this morning, as the Auto Show opens in the city, the screens have gone red again. 

President Bush is making rallying cries for the economy, but the whole of the city has one eye on the markets. As I was driven though the gridlocked streets this morning, the radio station was quoting the price of a barrel of oil as if updating the baseball results.

No surprise, then, that the NY show is quieter and more subdued than I’ve seen for the last few years.

The new Delta is an eye-catching beast in the flesh. It's a curious hybrid of the old long-roofed Lancia Beta HPE sports hatch and an imaginary medium-size version of the Rover 75. But the Rover comparison is apt. 

Lancia has been on the rocks for over two decades. Last year it sold around 125,000 cars, relying on the home market and a continental taste for the ritzy Lancia Ypsilon supermini. Lancia's current design strategy, like that of Rover, could be looking for a
market for which little evidence exists. While the Rover 75 was a clever re-think of the hackneyed 'gentleman's club', the Lancia strategy is for the "relaxed, convivial atmosphere of an elegantly casual lounge."

So the idea of the traditional St James' gentleman's club interior has morphed into a vodka bar or a celebrity haunt such as Soho House, but it amounts to much the same thing.

Walking past the Dacia stand, my gaze fell on the just-unveiled Sandero hatchback – the £6k supermini made by Renault, and headed for a showroom near you in early 2009. Now, this probably isn’t the type of car you’d put on your list of must-sees at any motor show; it’s the type of car you wander past on route to somewhere else. And then curiosity takes hold.

That’s exactly what happened with me. The chance to check out what kind of car this is proved too much to resist: can Renault really make a properly-screwed together B-segment entrant, made from materials other than second-hand UHU glue and sandpaper, for less than the price of a Citroen C1?

The thickness and heft of the options catalogue for the new Fiat 500 has (excuse the awful pun) been well documented. As anyone who’s seriously considered ordering one of these fashionable little cars will know, you can have one in any colour combination you like, with one of several interior colour and trim themes, and that’s before you’ve started with the accessories. But at Geneva this year, there’s one that comes with its own lift and espresso bar. 

You couldn’t miss Fiat’s gigantic tribute to its hugely successful supermini at this year’s show. It’s literally the size of a house; you walk in via the wheelarches. Inside it there are interactive video displays on which you can view the 500 in all its guises and permutations. There’s a lift where the back seats should be, taking you up to the mezzanine level, where you can look at video screens positioned where the windows would be.

It's always the way at big motor shows - sometimes you find yourself stumbling across cool stuff almost by accident.

In this case, the Suzuki A-Star - a handsome little concept that hints in very broad terms at Suzuki's new city car, developed in conjunction with Maruti Suzuki in India and coming later this year. The concept was originally shown at the Delhi show in India, perhaps explaining the lack of hoopla made over it here. But I thought it was a thoroughly handsome little thing, looking like an upmarket Aygo, even beneath the show bling.