It’s obviously summer time, and here in Switzerland right in the middle of the really hot temperatures down in Spain and Italy and the really cold temperatures up north in parts of Scandinavia, we’re enjoying perfect summer weather. This is obviously the kind of conditions you imagine when you decide to spend a significant amount of money on a car in the categories sports/hypercar or luxury convertible, so the time to enjoy them has definitely come – and if it’s a convertible, so has the time for shielding your head from the sun during those long, nice drives.

It’s not just in the summer that Zurich is a rolling car exhibition, but clearly the number of beautiful automobiles is higher in July than in November and they tend to be cleaner as well, thereby lending themselves better to the game I thought we’d play this week. It’s one I’m sure we all played as kids and that just maybe some of us still play as grown-ups. I’m of course talking about variations of the excellent mind game “which one would I pick?”! It was when walking through the city the other week that I photographed the following four cars within an area of 200 meters, and thought they lent themselves very well to this exercise. Also, the results could be a good way of getting to know our readers a bit better through your preferences, so please therefore put your replies in the reply section below!

We start with the most common car of these four, namely the latest version of the very popular Bentley Continental GT Convertible, or GTC. I personally think the most recent facelift has given it a much more modern and sporty look, perhaps especially from the back as pictured here. This is the four-litre V8 version with 550 hp, enough to get the quite heavy Continental up to illegal speeds in very little time. The happy owner has also chosen to spend some money on his very own license plate – you may remember the post on the Swiss system for auctioning number plates that you’ll otherwise find here. Anyway, the GTC is a beautiful car here in a discrete, elegant colour, and very much not in your face.

We move on to something that is the complete opposite – a very yellow Lamborghini Aventador SV, meaning Super Veloce, or super fast. That it is indeed, being powered by a 740 hp V12 that will bring you to 200 km/h in 10 seconds flat and also around the Nürburgring in (just under) seven minutes. As it does so, it will leave no one in any doubt of where it comes from and that there’s a bit V12 powering it. You can certainly debate how ideal it is as a city or shopping car but there’s definitely space enough for some of the small, expensive gift boxes you find in the many jeweller shops close to where it was parked. Whether it’s yellow or not really doesn’t matter – an Aventador will never pass unnoticed!

If the Bentley is too common and the Lambo too flashy, then what about a Rolls-Royce Dawn? After all, when it was launched in 2015 the brand referred to it as “the sexiest Rolls-Royce every built”! That was however not enough for CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös who also described sitting in it as “the most luxurious place to be on earth”. Be that as it may, the Dawn is no doubt a beautiful automobile creating just enough theatre with its rear-hinged doors, but its weight of 2800 kgs (!) means the 6.6 litre, 570 hp V12 needs to work hard. It’s thus probably better suited for downtown Zurich than the Aventador, even though the owner’s choice of parking space could turn out to be expensive. Then again, in this league, who cares…

The final pick is perhaps the best representative of a time long before engines had many hundred horsepower, and prestige was instead defined by opulent design and plush materials. This beautiful Mercedes-Benz 280 SE 3.5 V8 Cabriolet (long name for a legendary car!) that we’ll come back to on the blog as it’s worth a post of its own, was built in the late 60’s – early 70’s 1232 times. The 230 hp, 3.5 litre V8 had its work cut out with the quite heavy car, but this was of course never meant to be a Nürburgring racer so power was quite sufficient at the time, as it remains today.

Those are the candidates, which one would you pick? I’ll obviously tell you which one my choice would be, and it probably comes at no surprise that I would go for the beautiful Merc. I certainly wouldn’t mind the others either but as said, if you need to pick one, that’s my choice. Please put yours in the comments or, if you happen to be the very fortunate owner of any of these masterpieces, perhaps a photo of it!