1972 500 v 2011 500
Seeing our pale blue 2011 Fiat 500 next to David Peters’ beautiful 1972 example in dark blue shows just how notions of normality have changed over half a century. A Fiat 500, by anyone’s definition, is very small. But take each out of context and place it in the other one’s world, and the modern one looks massive while the old one looks microscopic. That’s how much bigger cars have become. These are cars of their times. So the setting might have changed, but the idea hasn’t. Except that, this time, the idea looks back as well as forward. Still, it’s a great excuse for a party. If you’re going to launch a retro-look new car, do it in style. Fiat certainly did, virtually taking over Turin in 2007 to launch the ‘nuova nuova’ 500, 50 years to the day after it launched the ‘nuova’ 500 – so called because it replaced the old front-engined 500 that everyone called Topolino. It was a huge celebration, with tiny rear-engined 500s everywhere.
The new-new one is front-engined and also front-wheel drive, of course, which means that, as with the Beetle, the retroness is visual-only. (And sometimes sonic, but we’ll come to that.) But that doesn’t stop it from being closer in aesthetic spirit to the car that inspired it than any the other pairings here, and also far and away the most successful in sales terms without much changing in 10 years of production. Where did those years go?
Today’s 500 grew from Fiat’s Trepiuno concept car, designed by Roberto Giolito (a proper petrolhead, nowadays in charge of Fiat’s heritage division while still being a stylist) but a little smaller, with only three seats. Fiat’s then-boss, Luca De Meo (he now runs Seat, in a neat circularity of history) told how his mother demanded that Fiat should make a production version. ‘And of course,’ he said, ‘as a good Italian son I do what my mother says.’
Instead of just being generally 500-shaped, today’s 500 is full of little details lovingly reconfigured from those on the old car. The contours of the nose and the badge that occupies centre stage, the super-stubby clamshell bonnet, the side-swage below the windows, the housing for the number-plate light, the authentic-looking rear lights and vestigial bumpers (both gone, sadly, in the latest minor refresh), even the flattened tailpipe, all mimic the originals. Yet there’s modernity here too, in the rising waistline, the deep and raked-back screen, the crisp edges to the window apertures, the glass roof suggesting the original black fabric.
Inside we find a body-colour dashboard like the original’s (unless that original was an L version), and a bigger version of the non-l’s instrument cluster complete with, in the Lounge model we have here, a period typeface for the concentric dial scales. Our example even has original, non-l, seat trim.
So we have the curious situation that the dark blue 500, which is actually an L, is showing signs of conventional plushness pointedly denied by the pale blue 500, the latter’s electric windows, air-con, Bluetooth, remote central locking, alloy wheels and six-speaker stereo notwithstanding. The 1972 500L has mono-coloured tan vinyl seating in grown-up
stripes, a similarly grown-up speedometer in a black dashboard and brightwork around its windows.
Both, however, have vertical two-cylinder engines. One was promised for the new 500 at the launch, and in 2010 it arrived. Now the 500 was sonically as well as visually right, but there’s no comparison in performance. 18bhp from 499cc, the Twin air makes 85bhp from 875cc, along with a remarkable wall of torque. It gives the present-day 500 its own form of squirty urban nippiness, something the tiny original was always good at, but now you can cruise comfortably to the south of France, too – as this pale blue 500 has, twice.
The mid-20th-century 500 mobilised Italy and made everyone an expert in double-declutching and patient overtaking. The new one has the same classless, age-spanning appeal, a fashion object to many but an authentic acknowledgement of what went before. And, especially with that Twinair engine, it has a cheeky character all its own. People just don’t expect a car which sounds like its distant ancestor to be so quick.