Few car brands are as tied to a model as Fiat is to the 500. The most famous Italian car in the world represents a fundamental part of Fiat’s history, one of the first and few brands to choose an acronym for its name in place of a surname. Founded in 1899 as the Turin Italian Automobile Factory, Fiat lived its best years from 1936, coinciding with the launch of the first Fiat 500.
Popularly known as Topolino and designed by the Roman engineer and designer Dante Giacosa, the original Fiat 500 was a success from day one and in just two decades of production it reached 500,000 units sold, a record for the time.
The Topolino was discontinued in 1955 to make way for the popular Fiat 600, but just two years later it reappeared as the New 500 in response to high levels of congestion in Italian cities. It’s still a cheap and practical city car, but the design changes radically and is now rounder and more egg-shaped, in the style of the Fiat 600.
The New 500 from 1957 lays the foundations for the design that we have all associated with the Fiat 500 for decades and that is already part of the history of Italian style. In fact, a copy from that time was chosen in 2017 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) to form part of its permanent collection, considering it “an icon of automobile history that profoundly altered the design and production Of automobiles”.
The New 500 went out of production in 1975 after 3.9 million units sold and, although between 1991 and 1998 Fiat produced an A-segment model called the Cinquecento in Poland, the real 500 did not reappear once more until 2007.
Exactly 50 years after the original model’s launch in Turin, Fiat reintroduced the 500 with styling cues similar to that of 1957. And that’s how the 500 has survived to this day and has become the most famous city car in the world. .
Since 2020, the Fiat 500 has a 100% electric variant that has become one of the most popular battery-powered vehicles in Europe. With two versions of 70 and 87 kW and a range of up to 330 kilometers, the 500e represents a third of the total sales of the model. The Low Battery version, with 190 km of autonomy, is available in Spain from 28,400 euros.
