Post cards from Karel

An ‘Auto’biography of History

This post card is from Locarno in Switzerland and features a right-hand drive (RHD) MGA 1500. Locarno is a resort town on Lake Maggiore in the Italian-speaking south of the country. The interesting part of the postcard is the RHD MGA. The Swiss drive on the right side of the road and therefore, most cars are left-hand drive. The MGA's license plate shows that it local, from the Canton of Ticino, where Locarno is located.

Why are there RHD MGAs in Switzerland? For an answer, we need to look no further than our own Swiss, Oliver Hoffmann, who drives a RHD MGA that his uncle purchased new, through the importer, in Switzerland (Oliver is a member of the Peachtree MG Registry, the local MG club here in Georgia). It turns out that some drivers in Switzerland prefer RHD cars for narrow mountain roads with deep ravines on one side and/or vertical rocks on the other side. Many Swiss army trucks and old yellow Postal Service busses are also RHD making it easier for the driver to position the vehicle on to the edge of the road: not too close to the rock wall and damage the car, or not too close to the ravine and fall down.

And the MG importer in Switzerland offered, new, RHD cars with a speedometer/odometer in kilometers instead of miles and a temperature gauge that reads degrees Centigrade instead of Fahrenheit. Although we can’t see the dashboard of the MGA in the postcard, it is very well possible that it is one of these rare models, just like Oliver’s.

~~ Reinout Vogt