GOTHARD MOTOR came out of a shared obsession: we liked cars long before they were a business. The sort who open the bonnet in a car park, read the whole service book before looking at the paintwork, and argue about whether an eight-speed automatic ages better than a manual. That obsession had us buying, fixing and selling cars for years between Spain and Switzerland, well before we set anything up.
Doing it that often taught us what separates a good buy from a bad afternoon, and it is not the asking price: it is the history, the real condition of the car and knowing exactly what it will cost sitting outside your door with plates on. In the Swiss market that can be established with a precision that does not exist elsewhere — there is a service book, there is a documented roadworthiness test, and there is a culture of actually maintaining the car.
Going from doing it for ourselves to doing it for others came from watching the same scene over and over. People moving back to Spain with no idea what to do with their car. People here after a specific, well-kept example they cannot find. And in between, a mass of confusing information about duty, VAT and registration tax that nobody explains plainly.
We focus on the higher end and on well-specified cars because that is where the gap between Switzerland and Spain actually shows: equipment that is an expensive option here comes as standard there, all-wheel drive is common, and the servicing gets done. On a small hatchback that advantage disappears into the fixed costs of importing; on a high-end car it pays for the whole exercise.
We are not a dealership and have no wish to be one. The car is never ours: we search, inspect, import and register, and we charge a fixed fee for that work which you know before we start. That is deliberate — it means we have no stock sitting around that we need to move, and that if the numbers do not work, our interest is in telling you so.