Fiat 124

Among the 298 Fiat entries in the MotorJury library, the Fiat 124 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 1966. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Fiat 124 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1960s were the decade of the pony car, the mid-engined revolution and the birth of the modern hot hatchback's ancestors — engineering advanced faster than in any decade before it. 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 Lamborghini Lamborghini Miura, the Dodge Dodge Charger, the Toyota Toyota Corolla — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Fiat 124 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1,197 cc Overhead valve engine / OHV Straight-four engine / I4 / 1,438 cc OHV I4 / 1,438 cc DOHC I4 / 1,592 cc DOHC I4 / 1,756 cc DOHC I4; kerb weight is recorded at 855 –; drive goes through 4-speed manual / 5-speed manual (Special T); the layout is FR layout. 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.

Its place in the Fiat story

Within Fiat's own catalogue the Fiat 124 sits alongside the FIAT 702, the Fiat 1, the Fiat 10 HP, the Fiat 1100. The record names the Fiat 1300 and 1500 as its predecessor and the Fiat 131 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to class = Small family car. Assembly is recorded at Italy: Turin / Bulgaria: Lovech (Pirin-Fiat) / Malaysia: Johor Bahru (KPKK) / Morocco: Casablanca (Somaca) / South Korea: Hwaseong, Gyeonggi / Hwaseong (Kia Motors).

How this catalogue works

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.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

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.

From catalogue to ownership

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 Fiat 124 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.