Fiat 500 1.3 JTD Lounge

Fiat 500 1.3 JTD Lounge

Road Test

Price Guide: $29,990 (recommended price before statutory and delivery charges)
Options fitted to test car include: nil
Crash rating: five-star Euro NCAP
Fuel: Diesel
Claimed fuel economy (L/100km): 4.2
CO2 emissions (g/km): 110
Also consider: Chrysler PT Cruiser (more here), Kia Soul (more here), MINI Cooper (more here), Volkswagen New Beetle

In the tradition of finding exactly the right car for exactly the wrong purpose, we took Fiat's tiny little retro urban runabout, the 500, from Melbourne to Winton for the V8 Supercar race.

That's a round trip of about 400km in a day, with two adults and two kids onboard. The decision to take the Fiat basically boiled down to the 500 having an MP3-capable audio system rather than any nascent aptitude for long-distance touring. Yet we can report that the Fiat performed admirably in this unusual role.

If there were one qualm to mention, it's this: The Fiat doesn't get much respect from the V8 Supercars audience. In fact, it didn't even get respect from a butch-looking woman in an N16 Pulsar!

Fiat has styled the 500 for retro appeal, but the 500 will convert even those users not living in the past. The conversion takes place over a day or so. It starts early -- with the Fiat proving easy to drive -- before seducing you with the satisfaction gained from driving it a little faster. Subsequently, you come to appreciate the 500 for its clever design, which manages to embrace a lot of conflicting parameters.

For example: the 500 is short and round, but there's adequate spaciousness inside for two -- and two kids in the rear, at a pinch. Aerodynamics are not usually the standout virtue in short cars, but the 500's wind-related NVH is acceptably low at highway speeds and it wasn't troubled by slipstream from trucks.

You would expect a small car that steers, handles and holds the road as well as this one to be choppy and uneven in its ride -- but it's not. And surely a car that is nearly as high as it's wide should roll more in corners than this one does.

Then there's the small-displacement turbo diesel engine, which is nowhere near as brutal as diesels in larger cars.

All of this does come at a price, of course. For some, a figure around $30,000 (before all those extra charges we can't quote) understandably places the 500 in an inauspicious light, but not so much if you compare it with other retro or custom car creations (see our list of potential competitors above).

Nobody's going to hold it against the Fiat for being a bit... little, but this is a car with a short shelf life if you intend to pick up the kids from school in it. Headroom in the rear is inadequate for anybody over 175cm tall, but legroom is actually good enough for younger teens, as long as front-seat passengers aren't giants.

The driving position can be a little cramped, with the footrest designed for smaller ungulates rather than human beings. That's one problem with driver comfort, the other being the relationship between wheel, pedals, gearshift and seat.

It's not a question of limited travel aft in the driver's seat, since the seat does allow enough legroom for the driver, but the lack of reach adjustment in the steering column offsets any benefit in that added seat travel. You have to sit a bit closer to the steering wheel than is entirely comfortable, unless you have arms like Mr Tickle's.

The seats in this car were trimmed in leather and were heavily contoured to hold the occupants fast during cornering. Cushioning was quite firm and the seats were very well shaped for sportier driving, but ultimately weren't as comfortable on the longer journey undertaken for this review. For most buyers, that won't pose a problem.

On the plus side of the ledger, the 500 has a remarkable turning circle, without the nervous sort of on-centre steering at open-road speeds often experienced in such 'shopping trolleys'.

It's dead easy to park simply because its corners practically fit within your own 'personal space'. That said, vision to the ¾ rear is not brilliant, particularly over the shoulder to the right. The roofline, smallish windows and the thickness/slope of the C-pillars would be a real hindrance in a larger car. As it stands, Fiat gets away with it because the 500 is such a small package.

The 500's 1.3-litre turbodiesel will never worry anything with a V8, but it can easily keep up with traffic and copes surprisingly well on the open road. Surprisingly refined for an engine powering a small car (especially a diesel), the powerplant also feels fairly sporty.

It's peaky by comparison with larger diesel fours but turbo lag is virtually non-existent. In short, Fiat has done some fine work reducing the diesel character of the engine to an acceptable level. There will come times when owners forget that they're driving a diesel... but those times will be in between gear changes, when the engine emits a diesel warble on the overrun.

Fuel consumption was 5.6L/100km, which included hundreds of kilometres of open-road travel, so that figure is not representative of what most owners might experience, but the trip computer was displaying 5.8L/100km before the open-road odyssey anyway.

The transmission features a foolproof shift action which is light and precise. Gearing seems to be widely-spaced and that's likely a symptom of the relatively low ratio for first gear combined with a high ratio for the final drive. Despite how that reads, it works quite well with the diesel engine.

Steering in the 500 is impressive. It's heaps better when it comes to feedback than the larger, conventional Ritmo.

Ride too, left the reviewer scratching his head. How could such a small car, with short wheelbase and low-profile tyres, cope so well with the worst that Melbourne's thoroughfares could throw at it? It doesn't glide over bumps, but it will iron them out with commendably little impact harshness and it rides better at a secondary level then many European cars significantly larger.

Praise to the 195/45 R16 Continental tyres for complementing the 500's cornering and its ride, but they're noisy on typical Aussie country roads. Of course, most 500 buyers will not drive further than 10 minutes from the closest mocha grande and tiramisu.

While the tyre noise stands out at open-road speeds, it doesn't worsen appreciably at speeds higher still. It's plain that Fiat designed this car for the autostradas as much as for the back streets and laneways of larger cities. Having said that -- and bearing in mind previous comments concerning the driving position and rear-seat accommodation -- you probably wouldn't want to embark on a city-to-city run in this country.

There were a couple of minor issues in respect of NVH and presumably build quality. These amounted to a squeak in driver's door and a creak from the rear of the cabin.

Other than those two points -- and the driving position -- we have nothing but praise for Fiat's 'Bambino'. She's a bonny baby.

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