Remembering the mad local car firms at the Geneva motor show

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30 March 2025

Traditionally at this time of year, the automotive industry congregates in Geneva for the world’s most important motor show – but to our great sadness, last year’s event was the last there will ever be.

A sad corollary of this is that we won’t get to enjoy our semi-regular laughs at concepts unveiled by Swiss design houses – or should we say mad houses? – Sbarro and Rinspeed.

Italian-born Franco Sbarro began his career as a mechanic, then set up his eponymous firm in 1968 – with zero interest in conventionality.

Sbarro first caught our attention at Geneva in 1973 with the SV1, an attractive sports coupé composed of NSU, Porsche and Volkswagen components – most prominently, two Ro80 rotary engines mounted side by side behind the rear seats!

In 1978, it combined a Fiat four-wheel drive system with a BMW engine in the shell of an “avant-garde cross-country vehicle” – then two years later took this format to a wild extreme, matching a G-Wagen chassis with the 450SE’s V8 engine and adding a third axle.

The Wind Hawk was, unsurprisingly, destined for the Middle East – just like the AMG G63 6x6 that Mercedes itself would produce 35 years later.

That 1980 show also introduced Autocar to Frank Rinderknecht’s Rinspeed, starting fairly sensibly with a small car for disabled drivers featuring a mechanism that hoisted one’s wheelchair out, up and into a roof-mounted box.

Perhaps the coolest thing at the 1982 show was Sbarro’s Super Twelve, a straight-12 hot hatch. Yes, really: the engine was two Kawasaki motorcycle sixes conjoined, making 240bhp. With a tubular chassis and a fibreglass body, it weighed 800kg – resulting in a better power-to-weight ratio than Lamborghini’s Countach.

Two years later, it produced an evolution, the Super Eight, with a Ferrari 308 GTB chassis and V8. This one-off came up for auction in 2024 but fell short of its reserve at $160k.

Enjoy full access to the complete Autocar archive at the magazineshop.com

Sbarro’s next show-stealer was the 1985 Challenge, a supercar of truly bizarre proportions with four-wheel drive, a centrally mounted 5.0-litre Mercedes V8, a retractable windscreen and… inflatable seats.

We actually sampled one of six road-registered examples a decade later. It had lost a pair of cylinders but none of the visual impact, and naturally it was “a disappointment to drive, failing to meet your expectations even in a straight line”.

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The 1987 Monster 4x4 was in a similar vein but had an even bigger Mercedes V8 – 6.9 litres – rotating the enormous wheels of a Boeing 747. Rolling resistance be damned.

Rinspeed spent the 1980s mostly creating sensible (well, relatively, that is) tuned versions of Porsches and whatnot, but in 1997 it decided to join in Sbarro’s game, giving us something that “looked like a 1960s front-engined Indycar on acid”.

That engine was a V8 from, er, Hyundai, a supercharger taking its output to a hefty 410bhp, and all while the Mono Ego weighed no more than a tonne.

It produced something similar for the 1998 show, called the Rocket, again using that Korean V8 but with styling more akin to a pre-war Auto Union grand prix racer – although “we won’t go too near the stand, because these cars often disappoint when you get close”.

If they had been unconventional in the 1990s, Sbarro and Rinspeed both really let loose in the 2000s, as exemplified by the latter firm’s millennium duo: a retro hot-rod pick-up truck with an integrated crane, called the Tatooo.com (huh?), and “an odd underwater scooter that looks like it’s from a B-grade Hollywood sci-fi movie”, called the Breathing Observation Bubble.

Aquatic machinery became a bit of a theme for Rinspeed, as shown by 2004’s Splash. Creating “a tidal wave of interest” (ahem), this was a chunky roadster that could hydraulically transform into not merely a boat but a hydrofoil, elevating it 60cm above the water. And fuelled by compressed natural gas for good measure.

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Having made “Dick Dastardly’s next car” in 2003 (“good old Franco is still taking the drugs, it seems”, we joked), Sbarro in 2007 created a six-wheeled pick-up truck by adding an electrically driven third axle to the… Citroën C-Crosser. Obviously.

In 2009, Rinspeed presented the iChange (everything new had to be ‘i’ back then, didn’t it?), which could alter its shape depending on how many people were inside – although funnily enough it was “cunningly perched on an elevated stand to keep its shape-shifting qualities hidden from the general public”.

We gave up reporting on this dynamic duo after that, so irrelevant were their creations to the road, but their presence still always raised a smile.

Ssangyong designer Ken Greenley perhaps put it best when he told us in 1999: “I don’t like any of the cars here, but Geneva wouldn’t be Geneva without Sbarro. I’ll give its stand a four out of 10 for being interesting and thought-provoking.”