News & Reviews- Make: Fiat

My singing teacher had one of these back in 1980. She was a cool old lady living in one of the nicer areas in the city, and driving what most of us at the time considered the poor man's, or in this case woman's, Mercedes SL. She was hardly poor, but merely understood that you can have just as much fun in a less expensive sports car while enjoying a more carefree type of prestige.

I won't go into all the challenges she had with her then new albeit horribly unreliable 124 Spider, because today's Fiat is a completely different company and its cars wholly better made. In fact, the new 2017 Fiat 124 Spider shown here is a thoroughly reliable Mazda MX-5 in disguise, or at least the mostly Euro-sourced components that gave such Fiat owners headaches decades are now Japanese made.

Italian engines have always been amongst the most revered. Some of the first and all of the best hemispherical heads came out of Italy going way back to the 1907 Fiat 130 HP Grand Prix racer, while Read Full Story

Want a good time? That seems like something you'd see etched into a public restroom stall door. The first time I ever saw something like that it was painfully close to the year this particular car references. Ok, I exaggerate, but it was nevertheless the '60s, when the original Fiat Cinquecento was most popular. This modern-day 500 1957 Edition actually pays tribute to the first year of Fiat Nuova sales; that would be the pre-Cinquecento (500-cc) model, even predating the 499-cc 16.5-horsepower Nuova era, when a 13 horsepower 479-cc version of Fiat's air-cooled, two-cylinder engine powered the same basic car.

That mostly-unchanged model sold a staggering 3,893,294 units from '57 through '75, which is reason enough for Europeans to have wrapped their hearts around it in similar fashion to the way most everyone adored the original VW Beetle, Mini, Citroën 2CV, Renault Dauphine and so many other post-war mass-volume cars (the Beetle was pre-war, but it became popular afterward). Read Full Story

Tired of seeing the exact same car coming around the corner everywhere you go? Of course, there's a lot to be said for buying a highly successful model. It's often a sign of good design, better than average quality and a strong brand image, but bestsellers can often appear a bit generic in their attempt to appeal to the masses and tend to lack unique character from behind the wheel, both in interior styling and driving dynamics. There's no chance of that with the new Fiat 500X.

As a backgrounder, Fiat first became part of the Canadian road-scape in 1910, two years after arriving in the U.S., although due to poor sales the Italian brand left both markets in 1983. That U.S./Canadian connection proved important to the Italian automaker's future, however, starting with a $2 billion USD compensation payment made by General Motors after choosing to terminate a then five-year-old put option that gave Fiat Group (FIA) the right to sell itself to GM for fair market value, which was money Read Full Story

So you want a 500 Abarth, but finances aren't allowing the $22.5k required? No problem, because Fiat's been listening and now offers a sportier 500 Turbo that will do the job for just under $19k while you're saving up for the world's feistiest subcompact.

I haven't met anyone who's driven the Fiat 500 Abarth and didn't love it, and I must admit the 500 Turbo had a similar effect on me. Ok, its sport-tuned single exhaust didn't growl as impudently as the Abarth's raucous dual pipes, the five-speed manual shifter I enjoyed in my last Abarth tester was replaced by an Aisin heavy-duty six-speed automatic with manual mode (although the five-speed stick still comes standard), plus the turbocharged and intercooled 1.4-litre MultiAir four-cylinder's ultimate output gets tuned down by 25 horsepower and 20 lb-ft of torque when compared to the manual Abarth or 22 horsepower and 33 lb-ft when more appropriately put up against the autobox equipped Abarth, but at 135 horsepower and 150 lb-ft Read Full Story

What's the cutest car available in Canada? Some might point to the Smart Fortwo, simply because it's outrageously small, or Scion's more oddly angular shaped although slightly larger iQ for the same reason, but the even larger yet still tiny Fiat 500 would probably be most peoples' first choice.

Fiat got the proportions just right when the Dante Giacosa-designed Cinquecento initially hit the European market in 1957, helping to make the impish rear-engine two-door one of the best selling cars on the Continent with 3,893,294 units sold throughout its 18-year tenure, and did so once again albeit 50 years later in March of 2007 when it presented the current completely redesigned Type 312 retro version at the Geneva auto show. I was there to witness (and ride on the ultimately-cool indoor rollercoaster with 500-styled cars that Fiat created for the show), and saw first-hand how even jaded journalists went gaga for the adorable little city car.

Ahead of 500s hitting European Read Full Story