Fiat’s 500e Abarth is a useless, electric sports car

What we have here is very much a city car, an electric shopping trolley – albeit one with very little room for bags.

The Fiat 500e Abarth Scorpionissima. Picture: Supplied

Being “creative” is a wonderful catch-all for being useless at life. Yes, I’d like to help you add up those figures, clean out the gutters, visit Bunnings (I just had to Google how to spell that) or screw together that stupid flatpack shelving, but I’m creative. Sorry.

I’m also infuriatingly incapable of planning, which makes my wife – who is my opposite in so many ways that it’s surprising she’s a human and not an android – loquaciously livid. Yes, I know what a calendar is, but I couldn’t use it, because I was being creative.

This can trip me up because I tend to book cars with a scattergun approach, not looking at our impeccably maintained (by my wife) calendar – which is how we recently faced the prospect of driving 180km to the Hunter Valley for a long-planned weekend away in the tiny and slightly useless Fiat 500e Abarth.

The problem was not the toy car’s pointless 185-litre boot, nor even the fear that a HiLux driver might not see us and crush us like a bug (actually unlikely, because the Abarth was painted Acid Green). The issue was that a colleague who’d driven it assured me we simply wouldn’t make it. Fiat claims a range of 255km from the Abarth’s 42kWh battery, but he claimed that was poppycock – particularly in freeway driving where it would get no benefit from stop-start regenerative braking. He reckoned it would be lucky to do 175km.

I found this prospect exciting and potentially hilarious, but my beloved and wise wife did not fancy being stranded, or spending the whole weekend listening to me whining about finding somewhere to recharge, so we left the Fiat at home and I borrowed a Genesis GV80 instead.

So what we have here is very much a city car, an electric shopping trolley – albeit one with very little room for bags. The problem with that is the Abarth badge, which means this is meant to be a super-sporty enthusiast’s version of the Fiat 500e. A car for driving fast on country roads, then, but one that won’t get you to those roads and back. Or, in other words, a speedboat that won’t float.

The Fiat 500e Abarth Scorpionissima. Picture: Supplied

Just in case you look at this tiny Fiat and fail to believe that something so tiny could be sporty, it’s fitted with something spectacularly Italian – the Abarth Sound Generator. I drove it in more typical silent-EV mode at first, because figuring out how to turn the system on is like reading hieroglyphics, but I regret those wasted and frustrated hours now.

The Abarth’s entirely fake engine noises are hilarious from inside the car (here’s a reference for older readers: it sounds like Michael Winslow is in the back seat making revving noises) and yet even more absurd from outside, where hidden speakers pump up the volume to screeching-flock-of-cockatoos levels. The car’s striking looks will ensure that people stare at you, too – which is, I guess, why some people are willing to pay $60,500 for the limited edition, lurid Scorpionissima variant I drove on my return from my Sunday too far away.

Due to the wettest winter in history, the other sound I heard a lot of was the pig-like squeals of protest from the tiny front tyres as they attempted to scrabble grip while putting 235Nm of torque to the ground all at once.

In the dry, Fiat claims you can hit 100km/h in seven seconds flat, but in the wet I sometimes spent as much as 70 seconds going nowhere at all, spinning my wheels, while people in the street pointed at me and laughed. Sometimes the wheelspin would happen in a corner and the steering wheel would attempt to tug my arms off, which was disconcerting.

The interior of the Fiat. Picture: Supplied

Speaking of embarrassing, this supposedly sporty EV has a top speed of 150km/h, which probably feels very fast in something so small (I never got far enough from town to find out), but really isn’t. Or not in a car with so many scorpion-shaped badges – it looks like it should have a sting in the tail, but it’s actually more like a listless mosquito.

All this sounds like I didn’t like the Abarth much, and I haven’t even touched on how annoyingly small the space for my left foot was, or how ridiculously small the touch-buttons on its fiddling screen were. But the truth is, when it wasn’t raining and I was carving and careening through traffic like some kind of Lightning McQueen spin-off cartoon character, I was very much amused by it. Cars this small are a particular kind of hilarious to drive enthusiastically, and are fabulously easy to park wherever you stop.

The Abarth version of the 500e is wildly unnecessary and hugely impractical, however, and if you must have an electric vehicle for very short journeys only, you’re much better off with the basic Fiat 500e at “just” $52,500. Or you could just buy an electric scooter. My wife got me one for Father’s Day recently, probably in the secret hope that I would fall off it and hurt myself quite badly.