The original Fiat 500 moved Italy on just 13 horsepower
The 1957 Nuova 500 was under three metres long, carried a two-cylinder air-cooled engine in its tail and produced a mere 13 horsepower. It still became one of the first cars designed specifically for city life, and its designer won Italy's top industrial design prize, the first ever given for a car.
Fiat's earlier small car, the 1936 Topolino, had its engine in front. In 1955 the rear-engined 600, laid out like a Volkswagen Beetle, replaced it, and two years later came the even smaller Nuova 500, 245 mm shorter than the 600. Its 479 cc engine, nominally 500 cc, supplied the name, while a fabric roof rolled back like the Topolino's. In 1959 Dante Giacosa received the Compasso d'Oro for it. Despite its size it sold hugely across Europe, and its drag coefficient of 0.38 was respectable for the era.
Variants multiplied. A 1958 Sport, white with a red stripe, was bored out to 499.5 cc for 21.5 PS and topped 105 km/h. The 500 D of 1960 had a stronger engine; in New Zealand, where Torino Motors assembled it, buyers knew it as the Bambina. The Giardiniera estate laid its engine flat under the boot floor and became the longest-running version. New safety rules finally replaced the rear-hinged suicide doors with front-hinged ones on the 500 F from June 1965, and the plusher L arrived in 1968.
Specialists found potential in it. Abarth built roughly 1,000 of its 695 SS from 1966, with flared arches, and only about 150 are thought to survive. Steyr-Daimler-Puch made an Austrian version with a boxer twin. Officially only the 500N reached North America, yet thousands arrived as private imports. In Japan, the 500 F became linked with the fictional thief Lupin III, first in a 1971 television series and above all in the 1979 film The Castle of Cagliostro.
Production ended in 1975, although the Fiat 126 had arrived two years earlier and later found greater success in Poland than in Italy. In 2006 Top Gear voted the 500 the sexiest car, and in 2007, fifty years after the original, Fiat launched a front-engined, front-wheel-drive successor styled after it. A 2017 anniversary exhibit appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Source: Fiat 500
