RC:
No offense meant, I went to school in Switzerland and really like the Swiss but the authorities in Switzerland are a pain in the a.. most of the time.
Example: many years ago, I drove in a rental to St. Gallen to participate in a small re-union at my older school. Why a rental? Well, my 911 had a transmission problem by that time and I didn't want to get stuck with it in Switzerland. The rental was a Mercedes S-class with the new night vision, distance radar, etc. system. To make a long story short: it had some sensors looking out of the grill and in the front spoiler. At the austrian-swiss border, a guy from swiss customs told me to park the car and that he needs to talk to me. What followed, was a farce. He insisted that I was using an anti-traffic radar system on my car. I showed him the car papers, it was clearly a rental and I told him that this is a new technology. He wouldn't let me enter Switzerland. After almost an hour (!) of arguing back and forth and talking to his colleagues, they took photos of the front of the car, made a copy from my passport and allowed me to drive to St. Gallen. When I started the engine, the very same guy came over and told me in Swiss German, apparently he didn't think I would understand it: "we will get you". I never understood what this fuss was all about until a good friend had a similar problem years later. Only this time, they were right, he had an anti-traffic radar system installed and they detected it AND impounded the car immediately. It took him weeks and a lot of money, incl. a swiss lawyer, to get his car back.
I understand laws are laws but I get the feeling that swiss authorities take themselves a little bit more serious than others in Europe. I was able to "escape" fines for speeding from Italy, France and many other countries by just being nice and apologetic. I doubt this would work in Switzerland.
I think that generally border police are worst then the other kind of police. It also has a lot to do with the individual. Here is a story with German boarder police.
When I was 20, I went on an european road trip with 2 friends. At the boarder between Holland and Germany, the customs stop us and started to treat us immediately like ' criminals' . The whole car was searched and we had a very humiliating strip search as they made humiliating comments and laughed while we had the pants down.
At the end they found a 'catapult' in the car...a toy a friend had bought in Amsterdam. They implied we were going to do a criminal act in Germany ( with a kid's catapult !!!! ) and they put my friend in jail for the night until he saw a judge the next morning, on charge of trying to bring a blank weapon into Germany
He was banned from entering Germany and his passport was stamped with a big red ''banned'' . That was a big problem as he was the son of an internationally well know person, they needed to travel a lot and if the media would of got the information if would of been bad for their business.
So..I agree the swiss customs are not nice to deal with, no sence of humor what so ever, do not think further then the 'code' they have to follow. But other's are not better
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997.2 C2S, PDK, -20mm