Abarth 205
Abarth
MarqueAbarth
Production1950–1953 (4 produced)
Power65 PS (1200 engine)
Engine1089 cc Fiat 1100 (1937) / Fiat Overhead valve engine / OHV Straight-four engine / I4 / 1188 cc Fiat 1100 (1937) / Fiat OHV I4
Abarth
The Abarth 205A Berlinetta was a coupé sports car, also known as the Abarth 205A Monza built by Austrian born tuning expert Carlo Abarth in 1950. It was a development of the Abarth Cisitalia 204A but with a new platform chassis, still using the engine and other components from the Fiat 1100 B/E.
Only three 205As were finished in 1950; chassis numbers 101, 102, and 103, but an additional car (chassis 104) was built in 1953 with an extravagant Ghia body. Slow sales meant that for the next few years Abarth chose to focus on building his exhaust and tuning business, allowing competition and car manufacturing take a backseat. In 1955, the 205A was succeeded by the 207A Spyder and its derivatives.
From the Wikipedia article Abarth 205A Berlinetta, CC BY-SA.
Among the 32 Abarth entries in the MotorJury library, the Abarth 205 holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1950. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Abarth 205 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1950s were the optimistic post-war boom, when chrome, tailfins and new unibody construction met the first purpose-built motorways and sports-car racing shaped reputations. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Chevrolet Chevrolet Bel Air, the Toyota Toyota Land Cruiser, the Cadillac Cadillac Eldorado — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Abarth 205 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1089 cc Fiat 1100 (1937) / Fiat Overhead valve engine / OHV Straight-four engine / I4 / 1188 cc Fiat 1100 (1937) / Fiat OHV I4; quoted output is 65 PS (1200 engine); kerb weight is recorded at 818 kg; drive goes through 4-speed manual; the layout is FR layout. Worked together, those figures give roughly 79 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within Abarth's own catalogue the Abarth 205 sits alongside the Abarth 1000 GT Coupé, the Abarth 124 Rally, the Abarth 124 Spider, the Abarth 1500 Biposto (1950). It was succeeded by the Abarth 207A Spyder. Design is credited to Giovanni Michelotti (for Ghia). Assembly is recorded at Turin, Italy.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Abarth 205 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.