At the last Frankfurt auto show in 2011, the big story was not the cars, but the euro zone crisis and specifically how the continent’s car companies could survive. This year, the crisis is waning but caution remains.

As sales continue to lag, especially in southern Europe, the most interesting new models are not sports or luxury cars, but family station wagons, the height of practicality. The most troubled car companies, PSA/Peugeot-Citroen and Fiat Group, have cut product-development spending so much that they have little new to display.

But cutting-edge designs are also few and far between on the stands of even such market leaders as Volkswagen Group. As a barometer of Europe’s economy, the show’s atmosphere has improved in two years — from desperate to downbeat — while the attitudes of Europe’s top auto executives reflect much of the market’s ambivalence.

“Perhaps a little bit of optimism is justified,” said Trevor Mann, Nissan Motor Co.’s executive vice president. “But I think the recovery generally will be slow [and] we should not get over-enthusiastic.”

Alfredo Altavilla, chief operating officer of Fiat’s Europe, Middle East and African regions, added: “The real answer is that no one has any visibility beyond the quarter. The trend is stabilizing [but] it’s too soon to say that it’s picking up.”

In the absence of CEO Sergio Marchionne, Altavilla was the senior Fiat official at Frankfurt, presiding over a low-key display that featured a seven-passenger derivative of the Fiat 500L as the brand’s chief new product.

Even Fiat’s pricy Ferrari marque, which unveiled the stunning LaFerrari hybrid sports car earlier this year at the Geneva auto show, could manage only a slightly more powerful variant of its aging 458 series to anchor its Frankfurt stand.

VW chose to showcase its growing range of electrified vehicles, from the e-Up to the e-Golf, adding several new versions of the Golf as well.

The German automaker’s budget brands, Seat and Skoda, likewise were relatively quiet, as were VW’s priciest marques, Lamborghini and Bugatti.

Ford Motor Co. did not stray far from the mainstream either, unveiling a concept of the next-generation S-Max crossover vehicle that it plans to put into production in Spain in early 2015. But two former Ford Europe premium brands — Volvo and Jaguar — stirred up some attention with concepts that were noteworthy for hinting at a new styling direction for each and for introducing scalable vehicle architectures on which both brands intend to build compact vehicle families over the next few years.

Jaguar and Volvo took different design paths, with Jaguar presenting the wagon-like C-X17, an early look at its first-ever crossover vehicle, and Volvo debuting the Concept Coupe, a sleek two-door that eventually will be joined by a range of compact models with common underpinnings, including a sedan, a hatchback and a crossover.

Karl-Thomas Neumann, hired this year to run GM Europe, sounded cautiously upbeat on the industry’s future. “We’ve seen the first little light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “No one here is expecting any wonders to happen, but I’m relatively confident that we’ve reached the bottom.”