SAE International Announces April World Congress Dates Beginning in 2005

WARRENDALE, Pa., Aug. 27, 2003 -- The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE International) announced today that it is moving its annual SAE World Congress event dates from the traditional early March timeframe into the month of April beginning in 2005. The 2004 event, hosted by Ford Motor Company, is still set for March 8-11 at Cobo Center in Detroit, Michigan.

SAE leadership looked at customer feedback and concluded that the move would be a welcome change for involved parties. "We reviewed a broad range of customer input -- including technical paper authors, and exhibitors as well as government, automotive and academic calendars and climatology data. From this data we concluded that we should work with the city of Detroit, the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau, and Cobo Hall to see if we could clear out the two weeks in April necessary to produce the event," said Dave Amati, Director of Automotive Business for SAE.

Indeed, the National Climate Data Center indicates April is a significantly warmer and less wintry month than March. There is far less annual snowfall in Detroit (1.7" vs. almost 7" in March), and the normal daily high temperature rises by 12.6 degrees Fahrenheit (57.8 vs. 45.2 degrees).

The inaugural April SAE World Congress, scheduled for April 11-15, 2005, will also mark the 100th Anniversary of the founding of SAE. "It is especially nice to be able to move the event to a warmer month in time for the SAE centennial year in 2005," added Amati. "We (SAE) will have many special events planned for the Detroit area during the week of the SAE 2005 World Congress, including outdoor events, and the prospects for warmer weather should get a lot of people excited. There is no question in my mind that weather conditions will have a positive impact on attendance at the SAE World Congress. Our record attendance year was in 2000, when high temperatures were near 80 (degrees) all four days."

  SAE has secured dates for the World Congress event 2005 through 2010:

  2005 - April 11-15
  2006 - April 3-7
  2007 - April 16-20
  2008 - April 7-11
  2009 - April 20-24
  2010 - April 12-16

Since 1947, the SAE World Congress has been the world's largest meeting and exposition devoted to automotive engineering and product technology. Each year the world of automotive engineering, design, and technology descends on Cobo Hall for the SAE World Congress. It remains the primary forum for the best and brightest technical talent to meet and exchange ideas with their peers.

For the latest information about the SAE 2004 World Congress, see the web page http://www.sae.org/congress