It really is high time that those tired old Fiat “jokes” came to an end as the Italian carmaker’s current offerings really are impressive…
There are some distinctly wince-inducing automotive jokes and japes out there, and if they’re enough to make the average petrolhead shudder, you can only imagine the effect they must have on the drivers, owners and manufacturers of the cars in question.
A few years ago I ran a Tata Indigo GLX as a long-term car for 20 000km. And while I seldom took it boulevard cruising or woke at 2am to drink in its liquid lines, it proved to be a perfectly efficient, if soulless, little appliance. But this didn’t stop the less charitable from delivering a barrage of especially stupid quips such as, “Tata ma chance!”
But perhaps the most memorable was one lobotomy candidate’s assertion that it was called a Tata because you “wave tata” to the parts that fall off as you drive along.
Fiat owners and drivers of yore must have mirrored my unamused reaction when told that the name does not in fact stand for Fabbrica Italiano Automobili Torino, but Fix It Again Tony, or derivatives thereof. And I won’t even go into those appalling Uno “jokes.”
These days though, anyone with any experience of a new Fiat, however peripheral and passing, would be hard-pressed to deliver such lame lines for the simple reason that the company’s cars are now very good indeed.
And because this is a blog and not an industry report, I’ll avoid telling you things like how the absurdly loveable little 500 has scooped awards around the globe. Or how the 2004 appointment of Fiat (and now Chrysler too) CEO Sergio Marchionne, a real can-do guy by all accounts, has clearly had a halo effect on all ranks and aspects of the group.
I won’t even go into Fiat’s reportedly revolutionary new TwinAir engine, which we should see here in SA around the middle half of 2011.
Instead, I’m going to stick with subjectivity and tell you that the last car I had before I went on a sudden sabbatical last year was a Grande Punto 1,4 T-Jet long-termer. And I loved virtually every aspect of that vehicle, from its mini-Maserati looks to its seamless turbo power delivery.
Serendipitously, when the long dark night of that sabbatical ended, the very first car to appear in my driveway last month was a little Panda 1.2 Dynamic, which recently had a mild facelift.
Here, it occurred to me once again, was a sparkling little package with lots of practicality and, perhaps rarest of all in a segment where cars are so often just white goods, lashings of character.
The Panda was immediately followed by a 500 Cabriolet, which looked precisely like a delightful, scaled-up rendition of a child’s toy and fascinated female onlookers who, quite simply, unanimously adored it, and rightly so.
It was also a remarkably well-screwed-together machine, and if I really, really tried to criticise it, I might be able to say – but without much conviction – that the button operating the trip computer was vaguely plasticky.
I think CAR’s newly-appointed editor, Hannes Oosthuizen, best summed up the 500C in a road test, branding it, “Extremely gay, but according to the ‘50s definition of the word.”
It also helps that I find the Fiat people I’ve met and mixed with, from CMH Umhlanga sales manager Mike Paul who hands over test cars to me to Fiat SA’s general manager of communications Clynton Yon, well, likeable.
But what really tells me that Fiat’s cars are now very good indeed is the fact that my old mate Thor has joined the Fiat family.
Now Thor and I go back almost a quarter of a century to school days when we used to pore over copies of CAR with the same enthusiasm that our peers reserved for girlie mags (well, we weren’t quite immune to those either).
Over the years Thor dabbled in a plethora of car brands, but remained largely faithful to Volkswagen and indeed his first vehicle at high school was a second-hand oil-burning Passat wagon that redefined the term “leisurely acceleration.”
While not entirely above emotion-driven purchases, Thor is also of a fastidious and analytical nature, and after extensive research opted for a new Fiat Strada last year – and was so impressed with the package that he got two relatives to buy Fiats too.
But right now he’s tempted to leave the Fiat family and return to the VW fold, for one crushingly simple reason: the new Amarok and the fact that right now the Italians don’t build a one-tonner.
And no, I don’t think that Thor would find any Fiat “jokes” amusing, either…