The Etceterini Files Part 20---Monteverdi and MBM: Outsourcing and Branding

Monteverdi, the specialist firm active from the Sixties until the mid-Eighties, would seem at first a bad fit for the Etceterini Files.  First of all, it was mostly known for large GT cars powered by Chrysler V8s. Secondly, the company was not Italian and was headquartered in Binningen, Switzerland, where Peter Monteverdi took over a repair garage operated by his father and began building and racing Formula Junior single seaters in the late 1950s.  His first cars, called MBM for Monteverdi Binningen Motors, followed the etceterini formula though, as the chassis, engines and bodywork were all subcontracted to outside suppliers. Around 1960, Monteverdi offered a two-seat sports racer built around an 1,100cc twincam four sourced from OSCA*, with 4-wheel disc brakes and a De Dion rear axle.  The alloy "wobbly web" wheels followed contemporary Lotus and Cooper practice.  

Monteverdi's asking price was high enough to prevent any sales, so apparently only one OSCA-powered car was built.  In an attempt to lower prices, he offered the coupe below with British-built body from Heron Plastics and chassis with Ford 105E power, but apparently no more than two of these British Herons rebranded as MBMs were assembled. In 1961 Monteverdi commissioned an MBM Formula 1 car around a Porsche Type 718 engine obtained on the private market when Porsche refused to sell him an engine.  The resulting car gained no points in GP racing.

                                   

But by this time Monteverdi, always alert to opportunities to expand his business, had expanded the repair garage to include a dealership selling  new Lancias, BMWs and Ferraris. This went very well until 1963, when Enzo Ferrari demanded that Monteverdi accept delivery of 100 new cars and pay in advance for all.  

                                     

Monteverdi declined, and eventually decided to fill the Ferrari void in his dealership by building his own GT cars.  The first car surfaced in 1967, a 2 seater coupe with alloy coachwork from Torinese coach builder Pietro Frua on a sturdy chassis of square steel tubes provided by Stahlbau Muttenz GmbH.  The engine was a 440 cubic inch Chrysler V8, and there were disc brakes all around.  Peter Monteverdi had thus joined the ranks of fledgling auto makers propelled into manufacturing GT cars by fury at Enzo Ferrari.  He was in good company that included Ferruccio Lamborghini, Renzo Rivolta (the Iso Rivolta*), Count Gianni Volpi (A.T.S.*, followed by Serenissima*) and Giotto Bizzarrini.*

Frua's glassy, fastback greenhouse had some of the flavor of his work on the Maserati Mistral as well as the AC 428 coupe, while the proportions and low nose may show the influence of Giugiaro's Maserati Ghibli for Ghia Studios, which had appeared late in fall of 1966.  Front suspension was independent by coil springs, while there was a De Dion arrangement at the rear.

Eleven of the Frua-bodied 375S High Speed coupes would be built in 1967-68.  In addition, Frua built two of the glassy. elegant 375L model shown above before his relationship with Monteverdi soured, apparently over the cost of bodywork.  One of these coupes was reportedly sold to AC Cars as a template for a four-passenger AC 428; the other car also survived.  Then Monteverdi outsourced the job of supplying bodywork to Fissore, also in Italy.

Fissore built a few cars to Frua's design before offering up their own interpretations of the luxury GT formula.  Those included  a small number of 375C convertibles on the 105 inch wheelbase "standard" chassis (shown above and below), with "sugar scoop" headlight detail, and in 1975 a lone Palm Beach prototype with a 98 inch wheelbase and low, rectilinear grille enclosing headlights more like the first Frua coupes.

Some time after Fissore took over supplying bodies, they restyled the 375L, still with Chrysler V8 power in the square tube chassis, and it became a production car by Monteverdi standards.  The 375L accounts for a high percentage of the GT cars Monteverdi built through 1976, with as many as 50 produced.  In the photo below, one of these cars rests below a Lamborghini Miura from the same period, which the Swiss museum curators have casually tossed onto an overhead shelving unit...

There was also a 375/4 four-door sedan (below) on a 125 inch wheelbase.  Retaining a low roofline, as on the coupes, Fissore gave the car the visual flavor of a stretched "standard" sedan, but of course there were no standard sedans (or really, standard anything) from the company.  By Monteverdi standards the 375/4 was a sales success, with around 30 produced. 

If Monteverdi had a magnum opus, it was probably the Hai (German for shark) 450 series, though it was barely a series as the firm only produced two cars from 1970-73, using them primarily to attract attention at auto shows. Though a mid-engined GT coupe powered by a Chrysler 426 Hemi (the first car, the 450SS) was bound to attract attention and some orders, Monteverdi declined to release the 450SS, then developed the 450GTS around a longer wheelbase and a Chrysler 440 V8.  Eventually the short-wheelbase car made it into private hands in the USA, and Monteverdi built two additional Hai coupes for his museum.

The Transport Museum has mounted an instructive display of the Hai chassis (sturdy square steel tubes again), wood body buck from Fissore, and  last in the lineup a completed Hai 450 in red.

The body buck shows the same careful workmanship that was evident on Fissore's completed bodies.  Note the recessed areas for the hood and headlight doors in the front view above. Peter Monteverdi claimed to have designed this car, but so did Trevor Fiore, who had designed a body with similar greenhouse, creased flanks and tapered tail for the Alpine Renault A310*.  Fiore also had experience with Fissore, having designed some TVR prototypes* which were fabricated by the firm.

Monteverdi did let out the Hai prototypes for testing, and the 440-powered long wheelbase GTS posted a higher top speed (174) than the SS (168).  Zero to 62 (100 kph) happened in 5.5 seconds, though weight was higher than the factory claimed, at over 3,800 pounds.  The original car, shown below in a beguiling shade of metallic raspberry, changed hands at least once after coming to the United States.  It marked the high water mark for the Swiss car builder's fame, but not commercial success.

That came later, with humble vehicles based upon the International Scout.  From the late 70s until Scout production ended in 1980, Monteverdi offered a Scout re-trimmed, inside and out, and with the 345 cubic inch International V8, or with a diesel option and re-branded it as the Monteverdi Sahara.  Monteverdi had seen the success of the Range Rover introduced earlier in the decade, and sensed a trend...

He exploited the higher end of the booming marker for SUVs by having Fissore completely restyle the Scout into something called the Safari…Monteverdi apparently didn't know or care that Pontiac used that name for its wagons.  The design, which went into production in 1977, was crisp and clean if not groundbreaking, and engine options included the Chrysler 440 as well as the Harvester V8.  Monteverdi now broke into triple digits in annual production for the first time, and hundreds of the Scout-based cars were sold by the time production ended in 1982, as Scout production in the US had ended after 1980.

Seeing profit possibilities in re-skinning American cars, Monteverdi took advantage of his relationship with Chyrsler to secure a supply of Dodge Aspens which he had Fissore restyle at the Monteverdi Sierra from 1977 to 1980.  Front and rear styling was cleaner and crisper than the Chrysler originals, but only around 20 customers showed up.  Most of them got the 4-door sedan shown below, though there was a lone wagon prototype.

There were also two or three of the handsome convertibles shown below, interesting as Chrysler had decided not to offer Aspen convertibles of its own.  The experiment ended when the rear-drive Aspen / Volare platform was discontinued for 1981.

After the success with the Scout rebodies, Monteverdi outsourced Range Rover 4 door conversions to Fissore starting early in 1980, with Rover's cooperation. After Monteverdi succeeded in selling a couple hundred, Land Rover management saw the value of making their own, and Monteverdi stopped production in 1982. That year and in 1983, the company offered something called a Monteverdi Tiara, which turned out to be an S-Class Mercedes outfitted with generic, uninspired grille and tail lights.  It was as if Monteverdi was aiming at Eastern Bloc apparatchiks who wanted Mercedes luxury but were embarrassed to be driven around behind the three-pointed star. The public responded with a yawn (if Daimler-Benz expressed an opinion, it has not been recorded), only 3 Tiaras were built, and in any case the Berlin Wall came down by the end of the decade, so the apparatchiks could become oligarchs and buy Bentleys. Monteverdi production ended in 1984… 

...for a few years.  In 1992, Peter Monteverdi decided to capitalize on his involvement with an expired F1 team by building an F1 supercar for the road.  It wasn't the world's most original idea (the Bugatti EB110 and McLaren F1 were hatched in the same era), but Monteverdi gets points for being involved with possibly the world's most honestly named GP team: Moneytron.  The Hai 650 F1 emerged with a chassis based on the Onyx Moneytron car, and a detuned 3.5 liter Ford DFR V8 making around 650 hp.  As with the earlier Hai 450 series,  at least two cars were built, and two were in the Monteverdi Museum until it closed in 2017.  Peter Monteverdi died in 1998.

*Footnote:  Most of the Motneverdi GT cars shown are on exhibit at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne.  Other cars on exhiibit at the museum are shown in our for July 4, 2019, "Roadside Attraction: Swiss Museum of Transport—Alfa to Zagato, and Everything in Between."  OSCAs are featured in "The Etceterini Files Part 7—Almost Famous:  OSCA", posted on April 20, 2016. Carrozzeria Fissore's Vemag DKW is shown in our Archives in the post for  August 29, 2017:, "Audi's Intermission: DKW Monza, Puma and Fissore."  Trevor Fiore's TVR Tina prototypes are shown in "Rootes in Foreign Soil", posted on March 31, 2018, and his design for the Alpine A310 appears in "The Car Search Part 2: The Fun Factor," in the Archives for April 24, 2016.  And readers should see the Archives for posts devoted to A.T.S., Bizzarrini, Iso-Rivolta, and Serenissima in the past year...

Errata:  The first version of this post commented that "Berlin fell by the end of the decade" in reference to the Berlin Wall.  The intention was to say the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.  As is widely known,  the city of Berlin itself fell in May 1945. 

Photo Credits:  Photos inside the Transport Museum were provided by George Havelka. The other photos were sourced as follows, listed by car type:

MBM Sports:  Carl L. Wagner
MBM Coupe, Monteverdi Sierra sedan and convertible, Monteverdi Safari, Tiara and 650 F1: wikimedia.
Outdoor photo of red Monteverdi High Speed Frua coupe + shot of orange Monteverdi Sahara: enwheelsage.org.
Monteverdi 2+2 Frua prototype (silver blue car):  Carrozzeria Frua.
Monteverdi Hai 450SS rear view:  Fantasy Junction.