There is a particular kind of German motorist who finds Switzerland terribly amusing. Our motorways are too slow, our speed limits too restrictive, and our approach to driving evidently designed for people who consider arriving somewhere a rather vulgar ambition. You know the conversation. A hundred and twenty? On a motorway? How do you people stay awake?
I occasionally wonder whether this is the same person I am following through a Swiss village at forty-two. 😖🤬☠️ The sign says fifty. The road is clear. There is no snow, no tractor and no obvious reason to suspect that the next bend conceals an international emergency. Yet the car with German plates ahead of me proceeds with the exquisite caution of someone who has been told that the accelerator is linked directly to his savings account. Forty-four appears briefly, before being reconsidered. Best not to get carried away.
Welcome to Switzerland, where Autobahn confidence comes to die.
Germany generally allows a hundred on country roads, where we allow eighty, and still has long stretches of Autobahn with no limit at all. Those stretches support a remarkable amount of national self-esteem. The freedom to drive very quickly is taken seriously, especially by people who enjoy explaining how little of it we have.
Which makes their behaviour on our side of the border such a pleasure to observe. Having spent so much time finding Swiss limits intolerably low, some visitors arrive and impose considerably lower ones of their own. Fifty becomes forty-two. Thirty becomes twenty. Apparently, our oppressive restrictions were merely an opening offer.
Of course tourists hesitate. I do it abroad too. But there is a difference between adjusting your speed to the road and spending an entire journey terrified of a Swiss invoice. Because that, I suspect, is where the missing confidence has gone. The same conversations that dismiss Switzerland as a motoring retirement home grow noticeably more animated when the subject turns to our fines. Too expensive. Outrageous. Daylight robbery. A country positively waiting for an innocent German right foot to make a small administrative error.
And so a road that presents no difficulty whatsoever is treated like an exam. The signs are legible, the car is perfectly capable, and the only thing demanding this extraordinary concentration is the possibility of parting with money. There is something magnificent about a car engineered for effortless high-speed cruising being nursed through an ordinary fifty zone by someone unwilling to risk forty-six. All that power, all that stability, all those decades of German automotive development, placed at the disposal of a man whose sole priority is ensuring that none of it appears on a bill. Which is touching, since doing fifty in a fifty zone remains, even in Switzerland, entirely free of charge.
The same logic, I suspect, governs the order form. The biggest car model the budget will stretch to, provided nobody goes mad with the options. From the pavement, a grand statement of personal success. From the driver’s seat, the discovery that almost everything desirable came at a surcharge. Call it the Matador Edition: plenty of bull, very few extras. His Swiss counterpart might have chosen the smaller model with every option fitted, on the unfashionable basis that he would spend more time sitting inside it than admiring the badge from across the street. Our visiting Autobahn hero has his priorities neatly reversed: look expensive, talk confidently and become very small indeed the moment either threatens to cost money. Even the bravado, it turns out, came with a strict spending limit.
Behind him, meanwhile, are the Swiss. The supposedly slow Swiss. The people who allegedly need a little German instruction in how to make progress. We would quite like to get somewhere, at roughly the speed our famously cautious country considers acceptable. Instead, we are following a visiting expert in unrestricted motoring who is personally demonstrating why restrictions were never going to be his problem. If you have spent years laughing at a country for driving too slowly, arriving there and becoming the reason everyone else is driving too slowly is an unfortunate contribution to your argument.
So, dear Autobahn hero, enjoy Switzerland. Admire the scenery and find your hotel. But perhaps save the next lecture about our painfully slow roads until you have stopped holding up the Swiss. We can discuss your need to drive at two hundred another time. For now, we are still waiting for you to manage fifty.
As always, just my five cents.
//Alex
