While green fever highlighted the Geneva Motor Show, the Swiss salon served up its usual fare of ridiculous concepts and specials...

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Mansory took the cake again this year. Remember its matte black Rolls Royce Phantom we rated Worst of Show last year? Well that weird mob was at it again this year.

No, its drop-top Roller was quite cool and the fact it forgot to laquer the gold basecoat on the pimped Mercedes SLR seemed to even work for that car this time round. But its bastardised Ferrari 599 was a travesty of justice of the worst kind. Were it up to me, the whole mob would go to jail for that. For quite a while. At the very least.

Mansory had good company this year though. One lot — I cannot recall their name nor claim to fame — seemed proud to present a matching pair of grotesque gold and purple Merc SLs... the just replaced one, thankfully. Ouch!

There were quite a few rather tasteful hatchet jobs among the various tuners on hand, including some of the many Porsche altering experts, notably Gembella and Rinspeed, which in fact also presented a submarine Lotus Elise. Why we'll never know but it was still quite cool...

Hot Fiat 500s were flavour of the month and some of the specialised stylists seemed to be on the right track — while some we'd prefer to forget we're quite happily missing this time around, too.

Sadly though, one of those missing was the great Bertone, and if the respective offerings of the collective lot of Giugaro, Pininfarina and Zagato were anything to go by, it seems that they will also follow poor Bertone down the designer drain if left to their own devices.

Farina and Giorgaro still chase dreams practically proven unreasonable as far back as 1970 in the form of cuckoo-clock and doors and attic-door action rooves, while quite how anyone thinks Zagato's desacration of Bentley's finest is worth the effort, let alone the clearly exorbitant cost is quite beyond belief...

See, all these once great companies have been handed down through several generations. And it certainly seems that grand style is something that is not genetically passed on. Quite a shame, really — some of these so-called scions of style would well benefit a few lessons in design, proportion and feel...

Their respective grandfathers must be quite literally spinning in their graves.

On the megacar front, Gumpert, Pagani and KTM continue to show how its done, Koenigsegg continues to astound and Spyker continues to confuse, while a number of other pretenders continue to, well, pretend!

But that's Geneva — a show that always delivers on the weird and the wonderful and 2008 was right on cue as per usual!.