Fiat 850

Among the 298 Fiat entries in the MotorJury library, the Fiat 850 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 1964. 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 850 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 Porsche Porsche 911, the Plymouth Plymouth Barracuda, the Nissan Nissan Silvia — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Fiat 850 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 817 cc Fiat 100 series engine / Tipo 100 Overhead valve engine / OHV Straight-four engine / I4 (US only) / 843 cc Fiat 100 series engine / 100G/GB/GC OHV I4 / 903 cc; kerb weight is recorded at Saloon: 670 kg / Coupé: 720 kg / Spider: 725 kg / Familiare: 900 kg; drive goes through 4-speed Manual transmission / manual / 4-speed Idroconvert/Idromatic Semi-automatic transmission / semi-automatic w/ torque converter; 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. Production is recorded at 2,203,380 units, which makes it one of the industry's true mass-production stories.

Its place in the Fiat story

Within Fiat's own catalogue the Fiat 850 sits alongside the FIAT 702, the Fiat 1, the Fiat 10 HP, the Fiat 1100. The record names the Fiat 600 as its predecessor and the Fiat 127 / Fiat 133 / Fiat X1/9 (Spider) / Fiat 900T (Familiare & 850T) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Dante Giacosa (saloon) / Felice Mario Boano and Gian Paolo Boano at Centro Stile Fiat (Coupé) / Giorgetto Giugiaro at Gruppo Bertone / Bertone (Spider). Assembly is recorded at Italy: Turin (Mirafiori Plant) / Spain: Barcelona (Zona Franca) / West Germany: Heilbronn (Neckar Automobilwerke) / Bulgaria: Lovech (Pirin-Fiat) / Malaysia: Johor Bahru.

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.

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