The story of Fiat’s oh-so-cute 500, a tiny Italian icon with a huge heart.
Fiat has recycled the 500 name a number of times over the decades, but for most enthusiasts there is only one true home for the badge – the cheerful little town car that was built from 1957-1975 and became an Italian icon.
Although we are focussing today on the Fiat 500 of 1957-1975, we really have to begin this story with another Fiat 500 – the one affectionately known as the Topolino (or little mouse) which was introduced in 1936. This was the first car designed by a young engineer and draughtsman called Dante Giacosa, with bodywork penned by Rodolfo Schaeffer. It featured a four- cylinder, watercooled, sidevalve engine of just 570cc mounted ahead of the front wheels (the radiator was sited between the engine and the bulkhead). It was designed to provide comfortable and economical motoring for two people, and that is exactly what it did with a top speed of 53mph and average fuel economy of over 45mpg. It would also cruise happily all day long at 45mph, and while those figures sound more appropriate to a push bike today, they were perfectly reasonable for a car of its class at the time
– a 1936 Austin Seven Ruby managed 52.9mph and 42mpg for example, and although the Austin offered four seats instead of the Fiat’s two, its driving dynamics were really of another era.
The Topolino’s biggest surprise, however, was that it looked like a toy car from the outside, but felt much bigger on the inside. It was helped in part by the fact that there was no rear seat, just a padded shelf for luggage – two children or one adult could be squeezed on there occasionally, but that was not in the design brief. (A proper four-seater version was designed by Fiat (England), but only 400 of them were built for the UK market, all in 1939.
In 1948 the Topolino was given overhead valves, which boosted power by some 25% and added both mph and mpg. In this form it was the 500B, and there was also a new threedoor Giardiniera estate version. This was a woodie, but it was later replaced by the all-steel Belvedere. In January 1949 Motor magazine declared that the four-seat estate version could offer over 50mph and 50mpg. The 500B did not last long though, because in 1949 the Topolino gained a restyled and more modern nose, along with an aluminium cylinder head. In this form it lasted as the 500C until 1955.
The Topolino was so successful that Giacosa was soon transferred from Fiat’s aero engine division to their passenger car projects. One of his later creations in this role saw the light of day in 1955 and was a big step forwards towards the 500 that is the main focus of our feature. This was the Fiat 600, which featured a rear-mounted, 633cc, four- cylinder, watercooled engine and managed to squeeze seating for four into a package with even smaller overall dimensions than the previous Topolino. The engine grew to 767cc for the 600D of 1960, and this lasted in production in Italy until 1969. However, it enjoyed an extended life overseas as a SEAT in Spain until 1973, and as a Zastava in Yugoslavia all the way through to 1986.
However, going back to the 1950s and hot on the heels of the Fiat 600 came the Nuova 500 in 1957.
The brief for this had been to create a car that was so cheap it would tempt Italians off their scooters and onto four wheels, and this quest for cheapness was to be behind many of the engineering decisions. Visually the new car was a slightly scaled down 600, but spiritually it was a successor to the Topolino with which it shared initially just two seats, plus a padded luggage shelf in the back that could accommodate two children at a pinch – the primary limiting factor for adults was the very limited headroom.
Like the 600, the 500’s engine was mounted at the back of a monocoque structure, but this time featuring only two vertical cylinders and air- cooling for an OHV unit of just 479cc. The engine was a brand new design by Giovanni Torazza, who had joined Fiat from Lancia, and was built with serious cost- cutting in mind. Not that cost- cutting is the same thing as cheapness, and this little unit had numerous delightful design details that shouted of thoughtful engineering, such as cooling passages pressed into the sump and a centrifugal sludge extractor in the oil system.
It delivered only 13bhp at 4000rpm, but Fiat claimed this would give all- day cruising at 50mph and still return 50mpg, while fuel consumption at a steady 36mph was quoted at 63mpg. Featuring an alloy crankcase, the engine was undersquare with a bore of 66mm and a stroke of 70mm, the narrow bores being necessary to keep the pistons close together on a crankshaft that made do with only two main bearings. The resulting long stroke gave it enough torque to be surprisingly flexible despite the limited capacity.
Those two cylinders were mounted one ahead of the other in a longitudinal format, with the pistons moving up and down in unison in the style of British twincylinder motorcycles. This format was never noted for its smoothness, and to limit how much vertical bounce was felt by the occupants, Fiat made use of balance weights in the engine, and designed an engine mounting that incorporated a flexible coil spring to absorb vertical motion before it reached the
cabin while still allowing the engine considerable up-anddown latitude. This worked surprisingly well, but the engines could move up and down in splendid isolation, and I recall stories of the first demonstrators in Italy being left with engines running on dealer forecourts until it was found that the vertical bounce would be enough to eventually lift the rear wheels off the ground!
The damping must have been very effective though, because testers of the day were very complimentary about the new car’s smoothness. Motor Trend of September 1957 even went so far as to claim that it was virtually impossible to tell that there was not a four- cylinder engine in the tail. However, there was no getting away from the meagre power output. In September 1957 Sports Car
Illustrated recorded 16 seconds for the 0-30mph ‘sprint’, and a full 25 seconds to inch up from 20mph to 40mph. They also noted that ‘ Lack of time (and road) prevented an attack on the 0-50mph time.’ Having said that, the general consensus among testers was that the Fiat was lively enough if you kept your foot to the floor and worked the gearbox hard because the car handled so well that you didn’t have to brake much for the corners.
That gearbox was a fourspeed unit, but it swam against the tide by having no synchromesh. First gear was sliding mesh, but the top three were constant mesh with dog engagement, which was by no means as hard to master as the earlier type of crash gearboxes – the dogs in the 500 spin relatively slowly, so you either went slowly and felt your way into the mesh, or accepted a slight clunk and treated it pretty much as you would a synchromesh unit. Alternatively, of course, you could dust off your double-declutching skills for quick and silent changes.
Suspension was, like the 600, independent all round with coil springs and telescopic dampers at the rear and a single transverse leaf spring with upper wishbones and telescopic dampers at the front. It worked amazingly well in the 500, with little of the tail-happy oversteer you might expect from having the engine mounted so far back. In fact, magazine testers described the 500’s default position as presenting modest understeer and being totally safe to throw through corners with abandon.
Inside the Nuova 500, the dash was a model of simplicity with just a single circular pod containing a speedo. There were no other gauges, not even a fuel gauge, but Fiat did provide a light that illuminated when the fuel was running low. There were other warning lights and switches of course, but not many of them. There was, though, a hand throttle, which helped with warming up a cold engine, but also acted as a primitive cruise control on longer journeys.
The central backbone (aka the propshaft tunnel, though of course the rear- engined 500 didn’t have a propshaft) housed a number of controls – gear stick, handbrake, choke and starter levers between the front seats, plus a control for a flap valve in the heating duct tucked at the back just in front of the rear shelf/occasional seat.
The windows in the doors did not open, but there were swivelling quarter-lights. Those doors were hinged at the back rather than the front, so- called suicide doors that provided easy entry and exit, but which were swimming against the tide of both safety and fashion. There was also a fabric roof that included a plastic rear screen and rolled all the way down to the waistline above the engine lid, chosen partly to allow in more light, but we would guess also in a bid to limit noise inside the cabin. The extra headroom was not to be sniffed at either.
The steering was highly praised by testers of the day, and Fiat had loosened the purse strings slightly when designing a system to go with the worm and sector steering box, one that ensured the outer rods were of the same length and so would not upset the steering
geometry as the wheels were turned. The steering lock was good too, little more than a London taxi and making the tiny Fiat able to turn in a single sweep on most roads. Brakes too were considered more than adequate, being large finned drums operated hydraulically. In fact, few testers found much to complain about, other than limited visibility from the thick cant rail and screen pillars or a tendency to mist up in wet weather unless the quarter-lights were opened – in which case the driver then got wet. Oh yes, and the pedals were offset towards the centre of the car (inevitable in such a small vehicle given the need for the front wheels to turn), but were criticised for having the brake pedal on the left of the steering column and for having an awkward action, particularly for anyone wearing high heels.
The Nuova 500 was introduced in the summer of 1957, but it didn’t get off to an auspicious start. Interest was high but sales were slow, the new car being regarded as simply too slow and too Spartan. In a panic Fiat went back to the drawing board, and in time for the Turin Motor Show in November 1957 they introduced a new variant, for all the world as though this had been the plan all along. This had an increased compression ratio that lifted power from 13bhp to 15bhp, and while 2bhp might not sound much, it is perhaps more impressive when you remember that it represents a hike of over 15%!
The new variant was called the Normale, while the previous model was rechristened the Economica. The Economica also got the more powerful engine, but obvious visual clues that set the Normale apart were winding windows in the doors and an upholstered rear seat.
In August 1958 Fiat offered the 500 Sport, with a bigger 499.5cc engine pumping out a testosterone-filled 21.5bhp (fractions are important at this level), all of them painted grey with a red flash. This bigger engine found its way into the regular saloons with the launch of the 500D in the autumn of 1960 when Fiat finally said goodbye to the 479cc unit, but it was detuned in this application to 17.5bhp. The 500D saloon had a smaller fabric roof that was now essentially just a sunroof over the front seats. However, if those unfortunate rear seat passengers lost some potential head room, they were treated to footwells to the floorpan which gave a little more leg room, and Fiat reshaped the fuel tank under the bonnet to make room for a small bag.
An even more important change occurred to create the 500F announced in March 1965 – the F stood for front-hinged and referred to the doors. The 500F also got taller and thinner screen pillars, plus wipers that were finally positioned to sweep properly on RHD cars. However, Fiat still did not say goodbye to suicide doors entirely. Since May 1960 they had also offered the Giardiniera estate, with an extra 4in of wheelbase and an overall length that grew from 9ft 9in to 10ft 5in. To cope with the extra loads this would be asked to carry, the bigger 499.5cc engine at 17.5bhp was used from the beginning, though laid horizontally below the load bed. Oddly, the Giardiniera carried on with its suicide doors until the end of its production run in 1977, by which time it was built by Autobianchi and carried their name.
Motor magazine in April 1967 described the 500F as coming with unusually full equipment in standard form. That praise rather loses its lustre when seen from the heady heights of the 21st Century, as they went on to list those equipment highlights as a heater, sunroof, windscreen washers and headlamp flasher. Ah, life was so much simpler back then! But remember that as well as going back well over half a century, the 500F was the cheapest car on the UK market at the time at £410 (including purchase tax). However, there were ways that prospective owners could be parted from more than the bare minimum
of cash. Take the Abarth 595 with its 594cc engine, for example – this retailed at £562 after purchase tax. In between these two extremes came the Mini at £515 and the NSU Prinz 4 at £550. Mind you, the Abarth was the quickest of the lot. Ultimately there were three Abarth offerings on the Fiat 500, ranging from the mildly modified Abarth 500 with 25bhp up to the Abarth 695SS which pumped out 45bhp from its 689.5ccs.
The next big change for the 500 came in 1968 when the 500L (L for Lusso) was announced. I expect you can figure out that Lusso is Italian for Luxury, but in this case it is all very relative. Nudge bars increased the overall length by 5cm, a few bits of glittery trim were added, and radial tyres were fitted as standard. Inside, the classic 500 binnacle was replaced by the oblong unit (with a petrol gauge!) from the 850 saloon. There were numerous other trim upgrades too, but the 500F continued to be sold alongside it until the demise of both in 1972.
That was the year Fiat introduced the 126, essentially an improved 500 with an enlarged body capable of seating four thanks to a longer and flatter roof and moving the rear bulkhead back by four inches to provide head and leg room respectively. The engine also grew to 594cc, and Fiat finally added synchromesh to the top three ratios. They also fitted that 594cc engine to the final 500 incarnation, but not its synchromesh gearbox. This was the 500R, which lasted until August 1975, when the baton was finally handed over in its entirety to the 126.
This picked it up and ran with it, with the engine growing to 652cc for 1977. In 1979 production of the 126 finished in Italy in favour of the new Cinquecento (which means 500 in Italian), but production of the older model continued in Poland where it had been built under licence since 1973 as the Polksi Fiat 126p. From 1987 there was even a Bis model that had a new water- cooled, twin- cylinder engine of 704cc laid on its side in a redesigned hatchback body.
Production of the 126 finally ended in September 2000, but of course that is still not the end of the 500 story as Fiat introduced their new, new 500 in 2007. This tapped into the retro craze with styling that was clearly derived from the Nuova 500 of 1957, albeit with four seats and a FWD layout. Built in both Poland and Mexico, this latest 500 has been a global success story for Fiat that continues today. And really, that just goes to show how fondly regarded the Nuova 500 was, and remains to this day.