#switzerland

Today’s Rare Ride is the third car in the series from designer Franco Sbarro. Our premier Sbarro creation was a windsurfing-specific take on the Citroën Berlingo, and the second was a very hot hatchback called the Super Eight – a Ferrari underneath.

While both of those creations were one-off styling exercises, today’s Sbarro actually entered very limited production. Presenting the Windhound of 1978.

The Eighties were the decade that saw the dawn of the hot hatchback. Today’s little red hatchback is really very hot, because it’s entirely a Ferrari 308 underneath.

We’re back again with more Monteverdi today, and I’m determined the Rare Rides series will cover all of Monteverdi’s vehicular offerings. European design, American power, and Swiss attention to detail combined with very high prices to make all the company’s models Rare Rides.

We’ve covered two earlier Monteverdi offerings previously, in the 1970 High Speed 375/4 sedan, and the 1971 High Speed 375/L grand touring coupe. Today we head into luxury SUV territory with the Safari.

Rare Rides featured a Monteverdi once before, the large and luxurious 375/4 sedan. While that limited-run model marked the culmination of the High Speed series of cars from the brand, today’s 2+2 coupe represents the brand’s mainstream product offering.

In the mountainous country of Switzerland, there once existed a company called Monteverdi. And for a few decades, it built luxurious and sporty coupes and sedans for a very wealthy clientele. Today’s Rare Ride is the first sedan offering from that company. It’s a High Speed 375/4, from 1970.

General Motors CEO and Chairwoman Mary Barra met with Canadian government officials in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday, but didn’t reveal any specifics for the automaker’s languishing Oshawa, Ontario plant, according to CTV News.

Barra spoke with Navdeep Bains, Canada’s economic development minister, before she met with new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Bains promoted Oshawa as a place for GM to build cars and develop technology for future cars. The Oshawa plant currently produces several outgoing models including the Cadillac XTS, Buick Regal and several others with uncertain futures including the outgoing Chevrolet Equinox.

Chevrolet built the Camaro in Oshawa before shifting production to Michigan last year, which resulted in 1,000 job cuts.

Volkswagen’s pain parade marches on, this time to Switzerland, which has temporarily banned sales of the automaker’s diesels.

My girlfriend and I recently vacationed in Zurich. Anyone who’s ever been to Switzerland will be surprised by this, since it’s possibly the least romantic place in human history. Seriously: instead of flowers, stuffed animals and chocolate, Swiss couples exchange presents like a well-built lamp, oddly-shaped stainless steel kitchen utensils, and … chocolate. And then they shake hands and sleep in two separate very sturdy beds.

After marking September 11 with the US 2001 best-sellers, announcing the launch of the Africa Project and a couple of world updates ( Top 150 best-selling models in June 2012 and our monthly World Roundup for July 2012), today I have to stop in Switzerland because we are witnessing a Japanese earthquake there…

Not in the mood for mountainous countries? There are 167 other countries and territories in my blog ready for you to explore, so get to it!

Back to Switzerland.

Munich, Germany, to St. Moritz, Switzerland. It can be a scenic afternoon ride. The nicest route, shown here would take you very leisurely four hours these days. Before the car was invented, it would have taken a few days and a lot of real horses. How about with pure plug-ins? 31 participants embarked on a plug-in rally from Munich to St. Moritz. It started on August 1. It ended on August 5th. Yep, five days. When I was young, I did that in two easy days on a bicycle. The electric cars took the better part of the week.

When you think about the Swiss auto industry, one thing usually comes to mind:

“What Swiss car industry?”

They nearly had one. The “Swatch Car” was pioneered by Swiss swatch-watchmaker Nicolas Hayek. It was killed by Ferdinand Piech, 5 seconds after he took the helm as CEO of Volkswagen. The Austrian Piech graduated at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH) in mechanical engineering, but even that didn’t keep him from exterminating the little Swiss critter at Volkswagen to save his own Lupo 3L (which also died.) Hayek turned to Daimler, the Swatch car became the Smart, Daimler took over, the Swiss car industry remained a dream.

But then, aren’t we forgetting Monteverdi?

We finally know who’s responsible for shutting down Nissan assembly lines in Japan and the U.S.A. The shortage of a critical computer chip stopped Hitachi from making ECUs, which in turn stopped Nissan from making cars. For days, the identity of the lackadaisical chipmaker had been kept under wraps. Now, the culprit has been unmasked.