A Small Small Car

On this winter's visit to Southern California, our rental car is a Fiat 500.  We asked for a compact, but rental car sizes, like athletic shoes, tend to run small.  Technically, the Fiat 500 is a minicar.

And is it ever small -- six inches shorter than a Mini Cooper with an itty-bitty four-cylinder engine that puts out 101 horsepower.  If I were Fiat and looking to expand the market for the 500, I would offer attachments to use it as a lawn mower or household vacuum.

Fiat 500s are seldom seen in the Northeast, but they are all over Santa Monica and West Los Angeles.  Most if not all are driven by young people.

It used to be that California was the home of the car culture.  Californians were the early adopters of muscle cars, German sedans, two-seater sports cars and Asian imports.  My impression now is that young Californians favor minicars or, if they have more disposable income, Priuses.  Mercedeses and Porsches are for old rich guys.

I don't know what this suggests for America's automotive future.  Possibly that Millenials would rather spend money on technology than cars (or clothes),  perhaps also that we will meet those tightening CAFE standards after all.

The Fiat 500 is the company's first entry in the US market in many years.  Its predecessor, also a 500 known as the Cinquecento (cheen kwe chen toe to those of you who have not studied Italian), was marketed from 1957 to 1975, a remarkable run in auto years.  This newer model was introduced in Europe in the aughts and has been very popular, selling 160,000 units there in 2013.

(It might be useful to note here that Europeans also have been enthusiastic adopters of the Smart Car, which looks like a giant baby bootie on wheels.  Gas prices in Europe are even higher than in California, which suggests that fuel economy prevails even over aesthetics in buying decisions there.)

Anyway, in my experience, the Fiat 500 drives better than it should.  It is surprisingly zippy for a little car with an automatic transmission.  With the back seats pushed down, the hatchback will hold the contents of a good-sized Costco run.  In fact, there is no reason to push the backseats up; no normal human, child or larger, could fit in them.

The chief drawback is safety performance.  The Fiat 500 (along with the Honda Fit) got the worst rating on the "small overlap front crash test" by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.  This test involves driving a car 40 miles an hour into a brick wall.  This is not a problem in Southern California, however, because freeway traffic traffic here never reaches speeds as high as 40 miles an hour.

The biggest plus for the 500 in these environs:  You can park it anywhere.