Motorworld

Switzerland

Your dinner party is a bit lacklustre and you’ve noticed the guests have started to glance at their watches, so simply lean forwards and ask this question: if you had to shoot just one person, who would it be? The next thing you know, they’ll have drunk all your best port and, outside, the birds will be singing. And the debate will still be raging.

Mark Thatcher is always up there as a hot favourite but Jeffrey Archer is never far behind. More earnest people go for obscure Serbian leaders or Third World dictators and Tony Blair usually gets a mention too, from people on both sides of the political spectrum. I always go for Colin Welland, but can rarely find support on that one.

The game has become so prolonged that we’ve now introduced a new twist. Given a nuclear device, where would you set it off?

This isn’t quite so successful because after just an hour, everyone is usually in full agreement. Japan always starts out as the obvious choice but they’ve had two already so it hardly seems fair to give them a third. Essex always provides some healthy debate too, as do France and Sydney, but it never takes long for someone to sit bolt upright and say ‘Switzerland’.

That’s followed by a pause as everyone weighs up the pros and cons and then, usually, everyone starts to nod. Yes, Switzerland, and not only because this is the only country on earth where everyone has a fallout shelter under their stairs.

It’s strange, this, because on paper, Switzerland has so much in its favour: breathtaking scenery, proper skiing, clean food, nice clocks and, to cap it all, we’ve never had a war with them. Well, they’ve never had a war with anyone, actually.

I think the big problem is jealousy. I mean, here we have a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world, a country with negligible unemployment and a country that’s had the good sense thus far to stay out of the EC and which, as a result, has made its inhabitants rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

Here’s a country with decent services, trains that run on time, bank accounts that are out of bounds to spying tax authorities, pretty lakes and a reputation for fair play. It’s no accident that the Red Cross’s emblem is a reverse of the Swiss flag.

It’s a nice place but that’s nothing to be proud of. I know lots of nice people; liberal, kind-hearted souls who help old ladies across the street and who never have a bad word for anyone. But without exception, they are dull. These are people who can put someone to sleep just by saying hello.

Their life is spent trying to arrange their facial expressions to match the moment, and they end up with no expression at all. And they’re so desperate to avoid causing offence, they never say anything even remotely interesting either.

It’s the same story with Switzerland. Britain has given the world jet engines, concentration camps, hovercrafts, television, skiing as a sport, telephones and football hooligans.

The Swiss haven’t even got round to inventing their own language, preferring instead to butcher that most ridiculous of tongues — German.

The national pastime out there defies belief. Millions of them have taken to collecting the foil tops from UHT-milk cartons. You can see hundreds of full-grown men rummaging around in bins, looking for something unusual to add to their collections.

The shops are full of rarer examples which sell for seven quid a go and the personal ads in the back of newspapers are stuffed full of swapsies. This is for real. The rest of the world is on roller skates and the Swiss are at home, sticking milk-carton tops in photograph albums.

I first became aware of a problem back in the mid eighties when I found myself with an hour or two to kill at Zurich airport, which was closed because of snow. It’s good to see, I thought, that even the most efficient country on earth can screw up sometimes.

And then I started to think more carefully about that efficiency as I strolled round the duty-free shops, smoking. Before I’d even lit the cigarette, I found myself being shadowed by a small man with an overall and a long-handled dustpan and brush. And each time I flicked the ash he was there, sweeping it up, keeping everything nice ’n’ shiny.

A few years later, I was on a skiing holiday in Zermatt, trying to squeeze inside one of the ridiculous milk floats they call taxis. There was a sign saying it was a six-seater but there was no way my left leg, complete with its ski boot, would get inside and this infuriated the driver. The brochure had said it could seat six, and he was damn well going to get six people inside, so he set about my errant leg, kicking it until the door would shut.

This is not what you’d expect from a people whose country plays host to the Red Cross, UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, the Worldwide Fund for Nature, the World Council of Churches and 150 other outfits dedicated to saving lives, not kicking people and having large, flash offices on the shore of Lake Geneva.

But this is only one side to Switzerland. You must not lose sight of the fact that every single male aged between 20 and 42 must spend at least two weeks a year in the army. Some spend more and some, those who’ve been clever enough to lose a limb in a farming accident, are let off, but here we have a fighting force with 400,000 men.

Who get to keep their guns at home. Officially, there are two million licensed weapons in Switzerland but everyone knows the real figure is closer to eight million — not bad for a country that only has six million people.

Everyone also knows that Switzerland is where the world’s terrorists come with a shopping list, and I know why. In my short stay, I was offered a brand-new Kalashnikov with a thousand rounds of ammunition for £300.

A thousand pounds would have secured the latest piece of laser-sighted hardware from America, or maybe a grenade launcher, complete with instructions on how to get it into Britain.

It is by no means uncommon in Switzerland to see someone walking through the woods with an AK47 slung over one shoulder, but interestingly, only 80 people died violently in 1994 — and a big chunk of those were suicides. The American gun lobby should use Switzerland as proof positive that guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

And the Swiss will kill anyone who tries to take their country by force. Contrary to popular myth, they do have a navy which patrols the lakes, but there are less obvious signs, too. Look carefully at the entrance to various tunnels and you’ll see camouflaged gun emplacements. Peer under some of the graceful motorway bridges and you’ll notice they’ve been mined, ready to be blown up at a moment’s notice.

There’s more. The motorways have been designed to double up as makeshift runways in a time of war and you’re never left in much doubt about the sort of air power Switzerland can muster.

Go hiking in the mountains and you’ll find valleys full of warplanes waiting for the Germans to get bolshy again. And then there are level crossings for jets.

These look just like train-type level crossings but the barriers come down to let Mirage fighters take off. It seems that as planes have needed longer and longer runways, they’ve been extended irrespective of what was in the way.

But what are the Swiss so worried about, for heaven’s sake? I mean, taking the place is a tactical nightmare thanks to all those mountains and what do you end up with if you win? Which you won’t. Some meadows and a cuckoo-clock factory.

Hitler couldn’t even be bothered, though it is said this was because all his wealth was stored there. He even joked about the place, saying that when his armies had conquered Europe, he would take Switzerland with the Berlin fire brigade.

This, of course, was not possible, because you are not allowed to take Switzerland with a fire brigade.

It’s one of many, many things you are not allowed to do in Switzerland, like wash your car on a Sunday, or hang your washing outside or run over a pigeon.

This must be the only country in the world where they have a special sign which is made at great expense and hung up throughout city centres, advising passers-by that roller-skating is not allowed.

I could fill the rest of this chapter with rules that would curl your hair and straighten your pubes but instead, we’ll just concentrate on what Switzerland is doing to make life a misery for the motorist.

In some places, like Zermatt, they have simply banned the car altogether and replaced it with a weird collection of electrically powered boxes on wheels. These sneak up and down the nauseatingly quiet main street, running over everyone who didn’t hear them coming.

But don’t worry. They can’t go quickly because there are still speed bumps all over the place. Do worry, however, if you need an ambulance and they roll up with something from the set of The Clangers to take you to hospital.

You get the impression they’d like to ban cars all over Switzerland but even the greenest politician out there knows this is not really on. So they’ve instigated a policy of gentle persuasion instead.

Ten years ago, they spent an absolute fortune widening roads and building huge intersections so that traffic could move smoothly and efficiently in a country that prides itself on such things.

But now they’re digging up the new lanes and making the intersections deliberately complicated. In towns, they are letting people in mental hospitals design the oneway systems so that they are useless and parking spaces are being cut.

This would be enough to drive every motorist to despair but to rub it in, they have gone bus-lane crazy. In Geneva particularly, they’ve crammed cars into inch-wide slots on the boulevards and avenues, allowing buses and cyclists enough space to drive around sideways.

This is costing a fortune. Quite apart from the cost of digging up roads, and making new and ever more elaborate signs, they are pumping billions into the public transport network to make it more and more attractive.

But here’s the thing. There are 1750 different banks in Switzerland, and all of them are run and staffed by fat bankers who have facial topiary and large Mercedes. And frankly, they are hardly likely to give up Strauss on the stereo and air conditioning in favour of a hot tram.

So they continue to drive to work, even though they don’t understand the new road layout, can’t park when they get there and will be fined thousands of francs should they be unfortunate enough to run over a pigeon.

The motorist in Switzerland is down on the ground with a broken nose and two cracked ribs but still the government stands over him in hobnailed boots shouting, ‘Had enough, bastard? Had enough?’

Their latest game is to ban all noisy cars and motorbikes, which is no bad thing if the limits were set by sensible human beings. But in Switzerland, they’re so draconian that the TVR Griffith is outlawed. Furthermore, cars with automatic gearboxes have to be two decibels quieter than those with manual shifters. No one knows why, and every car manufacturer I spoke to says the only way to achieve this is to make manual cars deliberately noisier.

Then there are the fines. Drive too fast and they’ll take your house and sell your children into slavery. They really are quite open about this — the Swiss government is proud of its stand against the car.

And the Swiss people are right behind them. I know we’re talking here about a people who will report their next-door neighbours for parking illegally, but when they had a referendum on the speeding issue they actually voted for lower limits on the motorway. Then they voted again for higher petrol prices.

This is not because they’re sick, or congenitally deformed; it’s because they’re frightened.

In the 1930s, Europe was under the spell of fascism, which was defeated. In the 1960s, there was the ever-present threat of communism but once again, the horror has gone away.

But there will always be anti-establishment figures who want to bring down free thought and democracy. Idealism will never go away, it just surfaces every few years with a different corporate identity.

And in the 1990s it’s back under the environmentalist banner. This time, though, the idealists are really on to something because in their quest to bring down commercialism and give power to the people, they have touched a raw nerve. If we carry on like this, the planet will die. In five minutes of geological time, we have turned paradise into a rubbish skip. The Dutch will drown.

And the Swiss have gone for it big time. In 1985, someone with a beard announced that the forests in Switzerland were dying and that drastic action was needed, right now, if the whole country wasn’t to become Europe’s first desert. He even gave the problem a worrying name — Wallestappen.

This terrified everyone: their green and lush country had cancer. The green movement got a toehold, which is all it ever needs to put a stranglehold on common-sense politics and lower speed limits were introduced, not for safety reasons but for the sake of the environment.

They even talked about an immediate overnight ban on all cars without catalytic converters. Well that’s just great — a million cars off to the scrap heap, no compensation for the owners and the polluted air from factories in northern Italy and southern Germany still tumbling over the borders.

Today, there is more wooded area in Switzerland than there was ten years ago but, even so, surveys show that 70 per cent of Swiss people still think the forests are dying.

The forests, in fact, are fine. It’s Switzerland’s car enthusiasts who are dying. A recent count showed there are only seven left.

One is Franco Sbarro, whose factory and school is in the twee little lakeside town of Grandson. Here he teaches students from all over the world how to design cars, an art he practises down the road in his workshop.

This is a remarkable place because slung up in the rafters you’ll find a couple of BMW M1s, several rare and exotic motorcycles and the odd GT40. And that’s not all because one room is stuffed full of engines. He has a couple of 3.3 Porsche turbo units, a Ferrari V12 and even a Merlin from a WW2 Spitfire.

Customers simply pick an engine and Sbarro tosses a few styling ideas at them. Maybe sir would like a mid-engined Golf? Or perhaps a Fiat Cinquecento-type car with a Lamborghini 12-cylinder motor? Anything is possible.

I drove a car that had started out in life as a Ferrari Testarossa but which had been stripped of its original body and equipped with something truly outlandish in plastic. It had no windscreen, looked like it had just landed and had two huge tubes running down the flanks. These acted as rollover bars but also fed cool air from the front of the car into the mid-mounted engine.

Then there was the swimming-pool-blue car. This one had a Jaguar V12 engine mounted at the back, but that was all it shared in common with a normal car. It looked like something U.F.O.’s Commander Straker would dream about driving. It didn’t really work though because it had a 75-foot turning circle and a steering system where the wheel was connected to the front wheels via a vast drum of yoghurt.

It was also not as fast as it should have been. Indeed, it was not as fast as a Metro but this, said Sbarro, was because it isn’t finished. It was designed simply as a styling exercise, a car to turn heads and snap knicker elastic, something it did rather well. I got through three pairs in an hour.

It’s odd to find such remarkable cars being made in Switzerland and I put this very point to Monsieur Sbarro, who answered quickly, ‘Ah yes. But I am Italian. I just live here.’

It’s just about the same story down the road at Rinspeed. This little outfit started out in life as a tuning workshop but has now moved into full-scale production with the aluminium-bodied Roadster.

It has a supercharged, 5.0-litre Ford Mustang V8 engine, rear tyres like lawn rollers and an interior that simply must have been designed by artist Roger Dean. To complete the picture, the test car I drove was bright orange.

Again, quite a surprise to find such a car being made in Switzerland. Er, well it isn’t. It’s actually built in America.

The last true Swiss car company was Monteverdi, which made some beautiful and very fast machines until the late seventies but these were styled in Italy, powered by Detroit engines and Monteverdi is a very unSwiss name, if you ask me.

The Swiss will tell you that many cars have been made there over the years but really, they can’t have been serious ventures because I hadn’t heard of one.

And anyway, we’re talking here about a country where there is no motorsport. When Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes left the road at Le Mans in 1955, killing 88 spectators, the rest of the world mourned but Switzerland simply banned all forms of competitive track-based car racing. And because it’s still in force today, the Swiss Touring Car Championship is staged in Germany and France.

The Swiss have lost their love for cars, but you can’t say the same about their relationship with the motorcycle. Outside Japan, they have the highest two-wheeler ownership levels in the world, and we’re not talking about miserable little mopeds either.

The streets are chock-full of chopped-down, beefed-up Harley-Davidsons and Yamaha V-Maxes, all of which are far too noisy to be legal. And yet this is deemed acceptable.

There is also the Ecomobile, a motorbike with an enclosed cabin and quadraphonic sound, that looks like a cross between a helicopter and an egg. It’s a pretty groovy device this, with little stabiliser wheels that drop down when you stop, but it costs £50,000 which is a bit off-putting. Swiss labour rates are blamed and it’s a shame because I rather liked it, in the same way that I find Kate Moss attractive. She isn’t… but you know what I mean.

I will say though that there was something desperately clinical about it. It was a bike, but it wasn’t, somehow. It was too high-tech, too clean and too functional for that. And it wasn’t a car, either, because it didn’t have enough wheels. It was neither here nor there.

And the same went for the Love Ride we encountered. This was a Sunday morning meet where a couple of thousand Hell’s Angels tore around the countryside on their Harleys with Peter Fonda at the head of the column… raising money for charity.

There was something very unthreatening about the whole show. I spoke with a guy who hadn’t washed his hair for twelve years, or cut it for six. He hadn’t shaved in a month or bathed in a year and he was bedecked in leathers and filthy denims.

But he wasn’t scary because on the back of his jacket it said, Hell’s Angels — Swiss Chapter, and there is something very comfy, reassuring even, about anything with the word ‘Swiss’ in it. It’s like beating someone to death with the Mail on Sunday.

Plus, instead of the goat’s blood I expected to find in his glass, there was orange juice. Had he ever murdered a virgin or kicked someone’s teeth in, I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I have a fantastic collection of milk-carton tops. Would you like to see them?’

Mad, but what do you expect from a country that has declared war on the car, even though it failed to declare war on Hitler; a country that finds the AK47 acceptable but has outlawed the TVR Griffith.

This is not a place visitors can fathom easily. I suggest you don’t even bother trying.