Timewarp Fiat Cinquecento | Spotted

A new era of electric city cars is nearly upon us - don't expect it to rival the impish charm of its forbears

You may have read elsewhere that Stellantis - the giant conglomerate that operates everything from Abarth to Vauxhall - is on the cusp of launching a 60 billion euro strategic plan intended to ensure its survival as the industry lurches into its electrified era. Among this sprawling, five-year mega plan, which features 60 (count ‘em) new cars, there is provision for a lineup of A-segment EVs intended to take advantage of the EU’s new E-car rules. Revivals of the Citroen 2CV and Fiat Panda are already in the works.

On the basis that small, affordable electric cars are generally preferable to giant, preposterously expensive ones, this is welcome news. But we should be under no illusions: the city car heyday, when they featured nothing more complicated than a carburettor and a heater, is not just long gone, but also fated to never return. Park even the current generation of A-segment car next to one of its ancestors, and you will experience the sort of cognitive dissonance usually reserved for staring at Roman ruins. In Rome, from a car park.

A current Toyota Aygo X tips the scales at around 940kg. A Fiat 500 — the spiritual successor to the car we're looking at today — weighs north of a tonne. And then there’s the 1994 Fiat Cinquecento, 700kg of unapologetic simplicity, sitting in a dealer forecourt in Southend like a time capsule somebody forgot to open. It has covered fifteen thousand nine hundred miles in thirty years. “Collector grade" says the vendor, which is a phrase you don't often see applied to a car that cost less than a decent secondhand Fiesta when it was new.

The Cinquecento, you’ll hardly need reminding, was Fiat's entry-level offering for a Europe that still believed city cars should actually be small, and it fulfilled that brief with an almost aggressive lack of ambition. The 899cc four-cylinder engine produces 40-odd horsepower - a figure that would struggle to excite a current-day lawnmower — and sends it to the front wheels through a manual gearbox that feels like stirring a teaspoon in a mug. The equipment list runs to approximately: a radio, some seats.

In other words, the Cinquecento heralds from a world that time forgot. Separating the driving experience from sound deadening and crumple zones and safety regulations and coffin-lid-sized infotainment screens, is like removing a sewn-up balaclava. Expect to feel everything. The road surface. The wind. The vague sense of mechanical protest when you ask for motorway speeds. Whether that transparency is charming or merely terrifying depends entirely on your relationship with modern comforts. But put it this way: we’d rather circle London in a biplane than a 747.

Not so long ago, the selling dealer might have struggled to give a Cinquecento away. But it is indicative of the public mood that the current nostalgia for analogue motoring has made even the humblest machines from the pre-digital era vaguely collectable - and a 15,900-mile example in pristine condition is genuinely rare. Its Fiat-badged, battery-powered descendant will be superior in every conceivable way, of course, but the era of the truly small car — the kind you could practically pick up and post through a letterbox — isn't coming back. This is what's left. Enjoy it while you can.

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LotusOmega375D

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