Fiat 500 Review
How do you recreate an icon for modern day motoring, especially when that icon was about the size of a watermelon and only slightly quicker?
The original Fiat 500 was a car that helped transform Italy into the car mad culture it is today, but Fiat knew that if it brought back the name and the concept of a very small city car it would have to be done properly. The Volkswagen New Beetle may be a reasonably popular car, but if Fiat merely pulled off a cynical rebody of another model in your range, the people would string up the executives responsible at the nearest convenient lamp post.
OK, the 500 is based on the platform of the Fiat Panda, but you get the idea – the car has to have something special to make it really stand out.
The model I tested was a 500 Lounge, in diesel flavour. The 55kW 1.3 litre diesel certainly has enough power to outrun the original – then again you could do that on a bicycle – but it just doesn’t seem appropriate for a car of this nature to have a noisy compression ignition engine when it should really have something that drinks petrol and revs to 200,000rpm.
The 500 handles far better than its tall proportions suggest, mostly due to the lightweight nature of the car. This is certainly one of those cars that does not need to go very fast to put a smile on your face.
Still the 500 is an attractive car, although it is very colour sensitive. The test car was bright red, which, while being very Italian, would have been better in an original ‘home appliance’ cream colour.
It’s inside where things get very retro. The steering wheel is about the only thing that doesn’t look like it’s an updated version of the original, which would of course be a wafer thin rimmed wheel with no airbag.
The air conditioning and radio controls are done out in a Bakelite-style coloured plastic and manage to look suitably stylish, while the high mounted gear lever means you don’t need to take your hand off the wheel for long to change gear.
About the only thing that’s wrong with the 500 is that while it is popular around other parts of the world, it just doesn’t sell well in New Zealand. It seems to be a combination of the availability of cheap Japanese imports, pricing, and the almost complete lack of advertising for the car.
It’s gone so far that a fellow journalist was asked if the Fiat 500 he was driving was the new Nissan Micra. So there you have it – the Fiat 500, wildly popular in Europe and ignored on the other side of the world.
