Experienced skiers – and the foolhardy – eschew prepared ski runs and go off-piste. Similarly, Switzerland’s truck manufacturers tended to defy convention and opt for the freedom of original thinking. That none survive today is largely the consequence of lack of the volume necessary to be competitive against Europe’s heavyweights.
The industry’s decline took hold in the 1970s. Several decades earlier, the minor players – notably Safir, Arbenz and its successor Oetiker – went off-piste and met their ends with either an avalanche of debt or ceased operations when appearing to be on the cusp of achieving their ambition.
Safir, founded in 1907 by Anton Dufour and Jakob Schmidheiny, collapsed after only a year. Having secured a Saurer licence and producing a handful of trucks, their attention switched to diesel engine development. The objective was to build an automotive diesel engine – therefore running at significantly higher speed and smaller in size than the marine and industrial diesels produced up to that point.
In what seems to have been an audaciously ambitious initiative, Dufour and Schmidheiny succeeded in recruiting Adolph Saurer and diesel inventor Rudolf Diesel as partners. Some authorities credit the Safir project as being successful. But did it really produce a working diesel that could be installed in a truck – two decades before anyone else? If so, why didn’t the engine see the light of day? Were Dufour and Schmidheiny
