Fiat Idea review
by Mike Grundon (1 March 2004)
We swept down the hillside from the cork trees and broken stacks of red granite towards the turquoise sea off the west coast of Sardinia. As the landscape unfolded below us, the switchback corners came one after another after another, all turning back in on themselves like the coils of a heraldic snake.
Spinning the steering wheel round from left to right to left as we kept steady pace down the serpentine road, I was impressed. This small box-like vehicle shouldn't have been coping with these conditions so well. It had felt very upright when I got into it, being only about three inches lower than it was wide, but over the past 50 miles of mixed roads the suspension set up had filled me with confidence, and now it was acquitting itself well on this most challenging of proving grounds.
This was the launch of Fiat's new mini MPV, the Idea, built small and competing directly with Vauxhall's Meriva. In fact, the platform it's built on is a joint project with Vauxhall's parent company GM, a platform partly shared with the Corsa and therefore the Meriva itself.
The Idea is a multi-talented little car which, despite being built on a B-segment platform is in fact fairly spacious inside. It's not as clever with its seating arrangements as the Meriva, but it is competitively priced and, as I was proving in the hills above the Mediterranean, it can be a fun car to drive too.
The range is simple. From launch the Idea comes with a choice of two engines and three specification levels. The petrol engine is a 1.4-litre that turns out 93bhp and 94lb/ft of torque. It can give the car a top speed of 109mph and get it up to 62mph in 11.5 seconds. It's a frugal unit, giving a combined fuel consumption of just under 43mpg.
The diesel engine is described by Fiat as the smallest and most advanced turbo diesel of its kind. With a capacity of just 1.3 litres it turns out 68bhp and an impressive 132lb/ft of torque. Although the figures show a top speed of just under 100mph and a 0-62mph time of 15.4 seconds, out on the road it feels much more flexible than the petrol engine. It’s also claimed that you can get an average 55.4mpg combined, which means it's possible to drive well over 500 miles between fill-ups.
Specification levels echo the established Fiat hierarchy. The base level Active comes with ABS brakes, electric front windows, remote central locking, twin front airbags, height and reach adjustable steering wheel, and a height-adjustable driver's seat. Prices here begin at a fiver under ten grand for the petrol version, and you add £900 for the diesel engine.
Move up to Dynamic and you add air conditioning, rear parking sensors, a rather tasty Blaupunkt CD player and ISOFIX child seat attachments in the back. Prices here begin at £11,245 for the petrol version and again you add £900 for the diesel.
The top-of-the-range Eleganza isn't available with a diesel engine, so by adding £1250 to the cost of your petrol Dynamic you get the addition of side and window airbags, electric rear windows, tinted rear and back windows, 15" alloys, dual-zone climate control, foglamps and an extra roof-mounted oddments tray in the front.
There are other options you can use to personalise the vehicle, like a complicated electronic stability pack and a CD player which can also play MP3 music files. Perhaps the most impressive of the options, though, is the SkyDome sunroof - a slight misnomer in that it isn’t domed at all, but it does turn more than two-thirds of the roof into glass, half of which is an opening panel that slides up and back to welcome the sky in.
The key to a successful MPV, however, is not its road manners nor its list of goodies – it comes down to seats, and what you can do with them when you aren’t sitting in them. The Fiat is not as cunning as the Meriva, whose rear seats fold and disappear into the floor, but it does have a few tricks. The rear seat is split into three, the middle seat being only half the width of the outer two. The middle seat does, however have a full three-point seatbelt and it can be folded over flat to make an armrest for the outside two.
In fact, any of the passenger seats can be folded down to improve the shape and size of the cargo area. The rear seats also slide back and forth to balance the needs of people and goods, and will recline up to sixty degrees, so that, taken alongside the fold-flat front seats, you can create a rather comfortable couchette you could sleep in.
While you're trying to get to sleep you could play Hunt the Storage Box. Depending on the version you get there are up to 27 of them dotted around the interior, including drop-down units in the roof and two desktop storage holds. However, when you see Fiat counts the door-pull trays and the bucket under the handbrake as potential storage holes you wonder if it's pushing the point a bit.
The Idea is aimed at young families or active couples, but on this pre-launch proving ground there were just the two of us on board and nothing in the back. On approaching the car, it wasn't a memorable first encounter. Fiat's own description of it as "a discreet yet purposeful one-box design" is probably pretty accurate. It's prettier than its blobby big sister MPV, the <Multipla>, and less chirpy than the Meriva.
Settling into the driver's seat and adjusting the rake and reach of the steering wheel, the sit-up-and-beg position combined with the vast acreage of glass all round makes the small car feel very roomy and light. The stubby five-speed manual gear-stick is presented to the driver in a short sloping pier that comes out of the centre console. The trim and line of the instrument and switchgear housing are clean and functional, with no attempt to tart them up with novelty shapes or coloured inserts.
Up under a cowl in the middle of the dash the dials, gauges and idiot lights are all clear and functional, and there's a small multi-purpose display for the clock, calendar, trip and computer information where fitted. The radio/CD too is clear and functional, with big easy to read and easy to operate buttons.
Driving off, it soon became clear that the Idea is an agile little car with that excellent MacPherson strut and torsion beam combination suspension system stabilised well enough to let me push on out with enthusiasm. Despite that, I found it also soaked up all but the worst excesses of the Sardinian road engineer's art - absorbing the humps and dropping painlessly through the holes.
The power steering was perfectly weighted and, while the gearchange had that small-car mechanical click to it, every shift was clean and secure as I snicked up and down through the box as the hills and switchbacks came and went.
After first impressions it's clear to me that the diesel engine is the better of the two, with enough torque to keep you accelerating up hills. I also found the petrol engine a bit noisy at all speeds while the diesel felt surprisingly refined.
What the Idea lacks in charisma it makes up for in practicality. My pick of the bunch would be the diesel Dynamic at £12,145 on the road.
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