The North American International Auto Show has been a cornerstone of Detroit’s automotive influence for years. Showcasing the best in German and Japanese engineering, the annual show has been a staple of January life of Detroiters for years.

This year, fellow multimedia reporter Jordan Reed and I braved the mild Michigan snowfall and its incompetent drivers to the Cobo Center, where they all gather to pick their next car to drive insipidly slow at the first sign of wintry wrath.

I digress from reporting the weather, however, as the highlight was the powerful heat lamps that light the floor and melt the flesh off of swarms of the elderly.

2012’s NAIAS pinnacles were the innovative concept cars, basically the end-result of the auto industry’s “Take your Child to Work Day” and letting them go buck wild on a drafting board.

While the showdown of the showcases often range from the tiniest microcosms of vehicles to the abstract behemoth gas-guzzlers too hulking to be relevant, this is Michigan, not Texas, and bigger has lost it’s luster. Good news for me.

Small was in it to win it, with Mini-Coops and fuel-friendly vehicles being hot commodities this year. While the gas expenditure has its perks, the tiny trunk space barely has the capacity for containing a whole body (as is shown in our Auto Show video).

Another selling point for whose attractions attained the most prestige is whose eye candy was the most mouth-watering.

Like in aspect of our car mechanics, our European friends beat out the American companies by a landslide, sending out squadrons of beaus to become vessels for militias of men assaulting them at close-range about Catalytic Converters as a cover-up for staring at their skintight T-shirts.

In short, the auto industry is catering to the customer of the future — smaller and smaller everything with a surplus of techno.

Critics have raved it to be one of the most successful of Detroit’s car conventions in recent years.

Finally we can travel from point A to point B in comfortably cramped style! Perhaps when the student loans cease.

Contact multimedia reporter Brian Figurski via e-mail at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @WhatDidBeefSay