The rats and mice of Geneva

The Geneva show is famous for throwing up oddball car designers (Rinspeed anyone?) and giving them the chance to rub shoulders with the big boys. It always has and, hopefully, it always will. This year was no different. Here are some of our favourites...

And that made its neat, clean Alfa convertible stand out even more. No flashy adornments, no knee-cleaving bits at the front, just beautiful proportions and overwhelming class...

...Until you got to its name. The 2uettottanta Concept (pictured in red) was built to celebrate Alfa's 100th birthday, but, unfortunately, Alfa will never build it.

The reason for that is the longitudinal engine might help with balance and visuals and historical references, but all production Alfas use transverse engines.

The pity of that is that the car is simply beautiful and beautifully simple. Unlike the following...

His 2010 Geneva effort, the Autobau (pictured in yellow), complete with its shin-busting cow catcher at the front, certainly succeeded there. It either resembles a future vision of aircraft-towing tugs or else revives the look of a 1960s sports car from a cartoon -- think Speed Racer. We can see it has been inspired perhaps by the 1967 Bertone-styled Lamborghini Marzal, but the Sbarro design appears to lack the same purpose and execution. It's supposed to be a 500 horsepower, V12 tribute to a dead racing driver, but it's just hard to look at it and connect what you're seeing to any serious thoughts.

Sbarro, in his spare time, runs a design school for budding car designers...

This one, simply called Hispano-Suiza, is a rebodied Audi R8 V10 (which is, itself, a rebodied Lamborghini Gallardo), but Himmel, the former VW Group design boss, is asking almost a million euros for each of the 20 he is planning to build.

Not the Australian designer's cleanest work, the SUV (what else would a desert kingdom want to build?) is built off the ageing Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen, and there are ongoing negotiations afoot for its tooling to be purchased and transferred to Saudi Arabia at the end of its useful German life. That could be some way off yet; did the Australian Army procurement bods just lift their noses out of their weetbix?

With a 388 horsepower V8 (whose 5.5-litre dimensions looks suspiciously Benzy as well), it's going to weigh 2.38 tonnes but it will have useful off-road specifications built in.

Officially, the Gazal-1 is an Automotive Project from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia University, so it's being branded KSU and Arcadipane, the former Ford and Mercedes designer, insists there will be a running prototype later in the year. Given that Benz has been building perfectly functional G-Wagens for nearly 40 years, it's hard to see why it would take that long.

Now, though, Bufori has managed to find itself on the upstairs hall at the Geneva Motor Show, somewhere between Volkswagen, Opel, Ferrari and Bentley with a V8 super limo.

While good looks were never an essential part of the Bufori story (although the previously unveiled Bufori CS looked handsome enough in a 240Z kind of way), whatever traces there were have vanished with its Geneva, a retro-limo which it says it will build from the middle of this year.

Now based in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, Bufori has built its own 6.1-litre V8 engine and claims it has 424 horsepower, which, it also claims, will propel its two-tonne limo to 100km/h in 5.4 seconds. It also claims a top speed of around 265km/h and, if that's not enough, they can even fit a supercharger.

With suicide doors, bi-Xenon headlights and a stainless steel chassis, complete with 1930s-style running  boards, the Bufori Geneva is an odd mix of curves, angles and jarring aesthetic challenges, but Bufori promises interior mood lighting, lounge-style rear seats and even options like a tea set that can even produce boiling water or an espresso machine.

-- with staff

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