Monteverdi
Among the 14 Monteverdi entries in the MotorJury library, the Monteverdi Safari holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1976. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Monteverdi Safari properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1970s were the decade the oil crises rewired the industry — emissions rules, safety bumpers and fuel economy suddenly mattered as much as horsepower, and Japanese manufacturers went global. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Lotus Cars Lotus Esprit, the Ford Ford Fiesta, the BMW BMW 7 Series — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Monteverdi Safari reads like this: the record lists its engine as 5,210 cc Chrysler LA engine#318 V8 / 318 LA V8 engine / V8 (Chrysler) / 5,654 cc List of International Harvester/Navistar engines / SV-345 V8 (IH) / 7,206 cc Chrysle; kerb weight is recorded at 2120 kg (approx) / 54%:46%; drive goes through 3-speed automatic; the layout is Front engine, four-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within Monteverdi's own catalogue the Monteverdi Safari sits alongside the Monteverdi 250 Z (1979), the Monteverdi 375 L (Frua), the Monteverdi Berlinetta, the Monteverdi Hai 450. The record names the assembly = Switzerland: Binningen as its predecessor and the class = Full-size luxury SUV as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Carrozzeria Fissore. Assembly is recorded at Switzerland: Binningen.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Monteverdi Safari was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
Tap a star. Ratings are kept on your device and feed the most-loved list.
Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.