Albar

Albar was a small Swiss car manufacturer founded by Alois Barmettler, a driving instructor and workshop owner from Buochs, born in 1931. The marque's origins date back to the 1970s, when Barmettler began converting Volkswagen Beetles into buggies and cross-country vehicles.

Building on this experience, he later produced a small number of sports coupés based on the Volkswagen chassis, fitted with fibreglass bodies manufactured in Austria. These cars were powered by Volkswagen or Porsche engines and were marketed in Switzerland under the name Albar Jet, while an equivalent version was sold in Austria as the Strato.

In 1982, the company introduced its most notable model, the Sonic. It retained the Volkswagen rear-engine layout but abandoned the platform chassis in favor of a space-frame construction, onto which a modern-styled fibreglass targa body was mounted. A fixed-head coupé version followed, distinguished by upward-swinging doors reminiscent of the Lamborghini Countach.

The Sonic was subsequently refined through several updated versions. Its original Volkswagen flat-four engine was replaced first by a Volkswagen-Audi inline four-cylinder unit, and later by a Renault 25 engine of 2165cc producing 110 horsepower, which continued to be mounted at the rear. Throughout its existence, Albar remained a niche manufacturer, producing these specialist cars only in limited numbers.