automobile - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 2015 - 100 Euro Cent

Frank Reisner, a native of Hungary Canadian, and his wife Paula were great car fans. In 1959 they founded in Turin, the company "Costruzione Automobili Intermeccanica", which originally produced Tuningsätze for cars. A short time later, they began to build their own vehicles in which adapted engines from other manufacturers were installed. Based on the Steyr Puch 500, a small two-seat coupé in the style of the Fiat 500 Abarth was designed in cooperation with Johann Puch from the Graz-based Puch factory (which had a cooperation with Fiat), which was named IMP for "Intermeccanica Puch" , Some models were converted to racing cars, and in 1961 even a race could be won on the Nürburgring. However, because of this, Carlo Abarth, the Fiat racing car tuner, obtained that no Puch vehicle parts could be used more for production - thus, the IMP project was over quickly. In the following years, the Italian company mass-produced various large road sports cars equipped with American engines and mostly exported to the United States. 1975 moved to California, a short time later to Vancouver, where mainly replicas of successful car models were built. After the death of Frank Reisner in 2001, his son Henry took over the company management and since then has been very successful in running the business. Intermeccanica regularly presents designer cars at international auto shows that combine the original flair of classic cars with state-of-the-art technology. All in all, only very few Puch IMP 700 GT coupes were built, of which only a handful have survived today. Each model is unique because all body parts were made by hand and assembled.