by David Finlay (22 Jan 04)

The title seems comprehensive, but in fact it barely begins to cover the material that author Malcolm Bobbitt brings to the pages.

This is an updated and enlarged version of a book first published in 1993. It follows the history of small Fiats, including (in chronological order and using the names by which they are most familiar in this country) the Topolino, the 600, the 500, the 850, the 127, the 126, the Panda, the Cinquecento, the Seicento and what is referred to as the Gingo but has, since publication, gone into production as the new Panda.

Actually, the net is cast even more widely than that. Bobbitt includes a reference to the 1924 Land Speed Record breaking Fiat, Mephistopheles, which is out of place here to the extent that if you took one example each of the cars mentioned in the paragraph above and added all their engine capacities together you would arrive at a total far short of its 21 litres.

This is in no way a criticism of the book. On the contrary, Bobbitt's willingness to look at the bigger picture is a major plus point; while there is enough intricate technical detail to satisfy anyone who has chosen "Small Fiats, 1936-2003" as their specialist subject on Mastermind, there is also much discussion of social conditions, internal politics, the career of Fiat's brilliant designer Dante Giacosa and the rival products of manufacturers such as Citroen and Renault.

Very helpfully, this puts Fiat's activities into a wide context, and creates a lot of appeal to people who are not already experts on these cars.

Complete Change Of Direction

The very early history of Fiat involves a series of monstrous Grand Prix cars dating back to not long after the turn of the 20th century. The Topolino gave the company a quite different worldwide reputation as a maker of small, inexpensive family transport. It was still available post-war but was by then an old design. Its replacement was the 600, which achieved the remarkable feat of carrying four people rather than two despite being considerably smaller.

Such a thing could have been achieved by resorting to front-wheel drive, but there was strenuous opposition to this within Fiat, so instead the 600 had its engine and gearbox fitted at the back.

The same layout was used for the 500, a car inspired by demand for something even smaller than the 600. Nowadays the 500 is by far the more famous model, so it's interesting to ready Bobbitt's account of what a complete shambles its introduction was.

Fiat quickly regained lost ground, though, and the 500 went on to achieve iconic status - designer Pete Stevens (responsible for, among other things, the shape of the McLaren F1 supercar) holds the 500 in very high esteem, and there is a case for saying that it is one of the most perfect automobile shapes ever devised. Certainly Fiat saw no reason to make anything other than detail changes to its design in 28 years of production.

During the last three of those years the 500 was joined by the 126, which was very obviously a development of the same principle. The 600's successor was the 127, though in this case there was a major conceptual leap - among other things, the 127 used the front-wheel drive layout whose very mention had caused such scowling and grumbling among earlier Fiat bosses.

No Going Back

All future baby Fiats were designed on the same principle. The original Panda, Cinquecento, Seicento and now the latest Panda have their engines and gearboxes under the bonnet, and it's almost impossible to imagine them having been designed in any other way.

The motor industry being what it is these days, it would be equally difficult to conceive of the later cars being produced in so many different forms both by Fiat and by other firms. Even the Topolino was offered in estate and van versions, though perhaps the most astonishing variant of all was the 600 Multipla, the six-seater which invented the concept of the mini-MPV several decades before the rest of the industry caught up.

It was perhaps the only car ever made by anyone, let alone Fiat, which could make the present-day Multipla look staid and unimaginative. The 600 version looked utterly bizarre, since the only way to extend the interior volume was sit the driver and front passenger on top of the front axle. The consequences of a head-on accident were beyond imagination, and such an ugly car would have no hope of selling nowadays, but in fact it was only Italian legislation banning rear-hinged doors that killed the Multipla in 1966, ten years after it was launched.

Even odder, and more dangerous still, was the open-topped Ghia Jolly version of the Multipla, which appears from the photographs in this book to have had all the structural rigidity of a sheet of A4 paper.

Further offshoots from the baby Fiats were simply beautiful. My personal favourite is the 850 Sport Spyder, designed by Bertone, but other gorgeous examples are described and pictured too.

The book also makes it clear that Fiat licensed several other companies to build its cars for their home markets. Probably the biggest name in 21st century terms is Seat, which manufactured its own version of the 500 and later models a long time before there was any suggestion that it might be drawn into the Volkswagen empire. Simca, now lurking somewhere in the depths of PSA Peugeot-Citroen, was building French-market Topolinos before the War.

A Winner From Austria

But my own favourite among these cars is the Steyr-Puch, visually distinguishable from the 500 only by experts but fitted with the Austrian company's own engine. Fiat had rejected the idea of a flat-twin design during the prototype stages (it went for a vertical twin instead) but Steyr-Puch decided to go down this route, and the result was a car which was subsequently able to compete strongly in motorsport.

So too did many of the Fiat-badged versions, particularly those modified by Abarth. The competition history of these cars (including many successful record attempts) could easily fill several volumes, but Bobbitt manages to cover the basics along with all the other information.

He finishes with a guide to baby Fiat ownership, covering everything from the Topolino to the Seicento and including restoration advice and even suggestions of how much you should be prepared to spend on cars in various states of repair. A mint condition 500 is surprisingly valuable these days, while at the other end of the scale I'm already beginning to wonder if a neat 850 might prove to be an appreciating asset in the not too distant future.

Fiat & Abarth 500, 600 & Seicento by Malcolm Bobbitt is published by Veloce Publishing Ltd at £29.99. ISBN 1-903706-69-6. More details at www.veloce.co.uk.

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