Stellantis’s Italian volume brand follows electric 500 with larger, longer-legged EV
MODEL TESTED600E LA PRIMA
This week’s road test subject is not all that it appears. At first glance, you could certainly mistake the new Fiat 600 for a direct replacement for the firm’s 500X crossover hatchback.
Well, supposedly it isn’t. While the 500X is set to continue in production for at least another couple of years, this new, slightly smaller and lower hatchback slots in just beneath it in Fiat’s range, where it will play bigger, four-door sibling to the 500 – just as the original 600 of the 1950s did. As such, Fiat is trumpeting this car as its return to the traditional European supermini market, in which it last offered a car back in 2018, before the Punto was withdrawn.
And so rumbles on Fiat’s now well-worn product strategy of copying the successful recipe of the smaller 500 and pasting it into as many parts of the car market as it possibly can, and giving 500 owners as many new and interesting reasons to come back and trade up as it can think of. This time, owners of the electric 500 will be in the crosshairs too. That’s because the 600 will be offered in both EV and 48V mild-hybrid form, the former adopting Stellantis’s latest e-CMP2 chassis, battery and motor technology, but delivering it at a lower showroom price than its many group relations, in what feels like a commercial move borrowed from an old Fiat playbook.
So, for the first time since the turn of the 1970s, Fiat will have both a 500 and a 600 in its showrooms. The cheaper, petrol-electric 600 is a car we have yet to drive at all – so the 600e will provide our first serious look at Fiat’s all-new model.
DESIGN AND ENGINEERING
The 600 is only a couple of inches smaller and lower of roofline than the 500X – and you can bet that’s what product planners call “temporary product overlap” (a signal, in other words, that whatever 500X replacement there is in the pipeline will itself grow dimensionally into clearer air). It makes a large and tall supermini hatchback, measuring almost 4.2m long and more than 1.5m high.
But if you look at its measurements carefully, the 600 most closely resembles not a Fiat at all but rather a different Stellantis model that’s built on the same product architecture at the same Polish factory: the Jeep
