Fiat 500
Fiat
MarqueFiat
Production1957–1975 / 3,893,294 units
Engine479 Cubic centimetre / cc Straight-twin engine / I2 / 499 cc I2 / 594 cc I2
Fiat
The Fiat 500 (Italian: Cinquecento, pronounced [ˌtʃiŋkweˈtʃɛnto]) is an economy / city car that was manufactured and marketed by Fiat Automobiles from 1957 until 1975. It was sold as a two-door semi-convertible or saloon car and as a three-door panel van or estate car. Launched as the Nuova (new) 500 in July 1957, as a successor to the 500 "Topolino", it was an inexpensive and practical small car.
Measuring 2,970 mm (9 ft 9 in) long, originally powered by a rear-mounted 479 cc two-cylinder air-cooled engine, the 500 was 245 mm (9.6 in) smaller than the Fiat's 600, launched two years earlier, and is considered one of the first purpose-designed city cars. In 1959, Dante Giacosa received a Compasso d'Oro industrial design prize for the Fiat 500. This marked the first time a Compasso d’Oro was awarded to an automotive manufacturer.
From the Wikipedia article Fiat 500, CC BY-SA.
This is the catalogue record of the Fiat 500, one of 298 models Fiat has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1957. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Fiat 500 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 Nissan Nissan Skyline, the Nissan Nissan Patrol, the Dodge Dodge Challenger — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Fiat 500 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 479 Cubic centimetre / cc Straight-twin engine / I2 / 499 cc I2 / 594 cc I2; kerb weight is recorded at 499 kg; drive goes through 4-speed manual (non-synchronous); the layout is Rear-engine, rear-wheel drive. 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 Fiat's own catalogue the Fiat 500 sits alongside the FIAT 702, the Fiat 1, the Fiat 10 HP, the Fiat 1100. The record names the Fiat 500 "Topolino" as its predecessor and the Fiat 126 / Fiat 500 (2007) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Dante Giacosa. Assembly is recorded at Italy: Turin / Italy: Desio.
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.
The catalogue records what the Fiat 500 was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in 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.