Fiat 500e review: the kind of car that makes you chuckle when you sit in one

It rides pleasantly and looks like you could park it in your sock drawer. Every time you take in its curvaceous cuteness you’ll forgive it its quirks.

Fiat 500e: “As a car it is pushing pointless but as an accessory it will be irresistable to some.”

It is one of the many loveable quirks of humans that we desire and adore pointless and unnecessary things. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom it’s rare to see predators turning the skins of their prey into handbags, and very few other species use nail polish.

Pursuing the pointless is common in our world, however. No one really needs a Ferrari, for example – if you look at it through the prisms of price and practicality, it is simply not something a sensible person would buy. You could say the same of another Italian icon, the Fiat 500, a car so small, at least when it was launched back in 1957, that you could park it on a pocket square and still be able to use the corners to dab away the chianti stains on your lips. Honestly, I stood next to an original example recently and I felt as titanic as Chris Hemsworth (I stood next to him once, too, after interviewing him, and took a selfie, which was the most unfortunate photo of my life. I thought it would make my wife happy, because she adores him, but seeing her husband in such close comparison may have permanently rotted the foundations of our marriage).

It is hard to believe that humans used to risk their lives by driving around in that first Cinquecento (as the Italians call the Fiat 500), which offered about as much protection in a crash as a parka. Many moons later, in 2007, it was relaunched as a larger, but still tiny, modern version. With all the boot space of a high-heeled shoe, it was practically pointless and yet almost irresistibly cute to behold.

Fiat 500e, built on an entirely new platform and with a 42kWh battery that can take you 311km on a full charge.

Fashion-frizzed inside, it was also just the kind of car that made you chuckle when you sat in one. I wanted to hate it, and when I drove the awful automatic version, which lurched between gears as if it was running on chianti, I did, but the five-speed manual variant with its shifter jauntily shoved into the dash was a thing of jollity. Then Fiat made a convertible version, with a roof that rolled back like a sardine can, and I loved that one even more.

Now, that car, with its petrol-burning engine, is dead and buried and an all-new electric one – the Fiat 500e, built on an entirely new platform and with a 42kWh battery that can allegedly take you 311km on a full charge, but almost certainly won’t – has been launched in Australia at a price that’s so silly it almost puts it in the Ferrari category.

When it comes to performative pointlessness, though, no company has come close to the Fiat’s Acoustic Alert, a system that toots out an operatic tune from the Federico Fellini film Amarcord (no, I’d never heard of it either) when you hit 20km/h. Not every time you do, just once, each time you’ve restarted the car – and not inside the vehicle, where you might enjoy it, but externally, presumably to tell other people, but only a few, that you’ve bought an Italian car.

EVs often make noises at low speed to warn pedestrians they are coming, but that is not the job of the Acoustic Alert. Indeed, no one at Fiat could explain to me exactly what it’s for at all, which I found initially frustrating, but then fabulously Italian. (The Australian equivalent, sadly, would be a Ford Ranger that blares out Khe Sanh or, at best, Love is in the Air.)

This is a car from a country that answers the question “why” with a riposte of “why not?” And one that builds vehicles, like the Fiat 500e, that radiate joy in the same way that a Toyota produces snore-like sensations of practicality.

It looks like you could park it in your sock drawer.

With curves this cute... Source: Supplied

This new Fiat 500e is made in Italy (the last one was built in Poland and Mexico), and this should probably give pause to anyone considering buying one, because it comes with only a three-year warranty.

Curiously, having spent so much time making it look like it’s smiling at you (it even has LED “eyebrows”), the designers forgot to engineer anywhere to put your left foot while driving it, which is infuriating. But then every time you get out you look at its curvaceous cuteness and forgive it everything.

The Fiat 500e is frisky rather than fast, rides pleasantly, and corners with the kind of verve you expect from a wheelbase this dinky. I didn’t love it anywhere near as much as the old manual version, but then living in an EV world that no longer has such gearboxes is something I just have to swallow, much like being elbow-high to a Hemsworth.

Speaking of which, the new 500e is apparently taller, longer and wider than the old combustion one, but it still looks like you could park it in your sock drawer.

Which brings us to the price, $52,500, a number that seems absurd and would almost render the sale of the Fiat 500e in this country pointless if it weren’t for the fact that there are many cashed-up coves out there who will love the look of it so much that they’ll buy one as a second car, and thus will care not that its range is almost as insubstantial as its dimensions.

As a car, it is pushing pointless, but as an accessory it will be irresistible to some.