Fiat Panda 4x4 review
by Mike Grundon (16 February 2005)
Salisbury Plain: proving ground of some of the world's toughest fighting machinery. The Warrior armoured personnel carrier. The Chieftain battle tank. The Fiat Panda.
It's a vast acreage of mixed open territory, woodland and farmland, criss-crossed with tracks of slimy clay soil, studded with flint pebbles. All around are the signs of warfare training - spent smoke canisters that litter the fields, signs declaring the woodlands a no-go area for tanks, the distant thump of occasional heavy gunfire, the suppressed whir of 1.2-litre petrol engines in red, blue and yellow family hatchbacks.
Yes, this is where Fiat chose to launch the rebirth of a once cult vehicle, the Panda 4x4. In its previous incarnations it was loved by farmers and country folk for its cheap, all-weather, multi-purpose practicality, and by the first generation of urban cowboys and girls for its cheeky character and gritty image. It first arrived in 1983 with a 965cc petrol engine turning out 48bhp. When, ten years ago, Fiat stopped bringing it to the UK, it had grown up with a 1.1-litre engine turning out 54bhp.
Well now it's back with a slightly more powerful engine, more internal space, better safety features, the likelihood that it's going to last longer than the rust-devoured early ones, and a price tag of just £9195.
Driving to the off-road course, just before its February UK launch date, I wasn't expecting much from its mud-slugging ability. It looks fairly similar to the road-going Panda. Outside it gets the same body shape - upright, boxy, square headlamps and pillar-mounted rear lights - but it gets the addition of roof-rails, side rubbing strips and more robust black plastic inserts under the chin and tail of the front and rear bumpers to make it look a bit more rufty-tufty.
Inside, it's absolutely identical with well laid-out, simple and functional buttons and dials and a stubby gearstick presented close to hand on a small headland attached to the centre console. From the driver's seat the extra two inches of ground clearance don't make the already sit-up-and-beg position feel appreciably taller.
The main difference is under the skin. The little 1.2-litre engine thrums away sweetly enough on the road, its 60bhp and 75lb/ft of torque enough to make it a comfortable enough drive without too much stirring of the five-speed gearbox. It's not a grin-inducing experience, taking, as it does, about 20 seconds to reach 62mph, but it's a secure one because despite the extra height it doesn't wallow unduly through the corners.
In short it is, to all intents and purposes, just a well-mannered compact, four-seat, five-door hatchback. But don't be fooled: this little car will do more than most when the going gets tough.
The first man-made demonstration course looked more dramatic than it was. Snaking around a combination of steeply cambered corners, dipping through a few inches of clay slurry, plunging down a couple of steep drops, it was no surprise that the Panda handled them without difficulty. The course was un-rutted and the flint content in the surface dirt meant grip was reasonable at every corner - my old Impreza would have coped fine.
The most impressive obstacle, however, was a long, steep hillclimb which looked close to 45 degrees. Rather than take a run up, I decided to put the 4x4 system to the test by just trickling up to the foot of the hill and then launching the car skyward. I was surprised and impressed. The little car scrabbled and squirmed on its dual-purpose but road-biased tyres, but it reached the top without drama.
Basically, the car is normally hauled along by its front wheels, but a viscous coupling with the rear driveshaft means you don't have to press any buttons or pull any levers to engage four-wheel drive; it's all done automatically. The idea is that when the front wheels start spinning, it builds the temperature, the pressure and the friction in the viscous coupling, progressively pushing more of the drive to the back axle. It all happens very quickly too, so that at times of maximum stress, drive is swiftly split 50/50 between the front and rear wheels.
Driving in convoy across Salisbury Plain was where all that kit properly showed its colours. Pitted farm tracks gave out to axle-deep rutted clay and then to fields, ditches and woods. We slithered and scrabbled our way across the landscape, running along the tramlines of earlier cars, leaving wheels hanging in the air as we plunged into roadside gullies and smearing the sumpguards up over ridges and crests. We manoeuvred through gaps in hedges, charged full tilt through spring-fed bogs, splashed through a small stream or two and got more fun out of the Panda than a five-door hatchback should have been able to offer.
In conclusion, this is a genuine dual-personality car, and who knows how the market will divide up across the year? I'm sure that, as with all types of 4x4, many of them will never get further from the tarmac than into the pressed-dirt car park of a country pub, but there are great tracts of Britain and Europe where they could and should prove very popular. These will be out where the snow falls more often than the gritters visit, where the best wilderness picnic sites are at the end of access tracks designed for farm vehicles, and where the ditches flood the roads in the rainstorms of August.
Sadly there are no signs yet that it will become available with the new 1.3-litre turbo diesel engine that has just been introduced to the road-going Panda range. I'm led to believe it's a matter of cost rather than anything else - Fiat wants to keep the sub-£10,000 price tag - but with the significantly better power, torque and fuel consumption, a diesel would be something special.
For now, though, the 1.2 4x4 is still an attractive car. With that rugged ability, a reasonable price, a long list of optional extras to make it even more "you", the promise of an average fuel consumption at around 43mpg, safety kit including airbags and ABS brakes and a cheery and functional interior, it has the credentials to be more than just a niche car. Maybe, once again, we'll see Pandas associated with wax-cotton and wellies, parked up in the corners of fields, back-seats down, hatches up, bales of hay being chucked out of them into feeding cages.
I'd like to think so.
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