Category: City Cars 
Price Range: £8,300 to £13,605
Powerful retro flavours matched with modern design, fun to drive, fabulous detailing.
Headroom is tight in the back, steering wheel not adjustable for reach, not much covered storage space.
See one, drive one and you'll want one.
As soon as you sit in the 500 you feel you're in a world of La Dolce Vita and Sophia Loren. The proportion of the door you've just closed is the starting point, tall relative to its length, with a shallow window. Then there's the dashboard, body-coloured as if made of metal, and directly in front of you a large, round instrument pod with a speedometer around the edge, a rev-counter concentrically within it and a digital information display in the centre.
Just the cushion of the seat can be moved and the steering wheel adjusts for rake only, but it's easy to get comfortable, and the high-mounted, precisely acting gear lever is conveniently close to the steering wheel. The short, rounded bonnet falls away quickly to give a fine view forward and the Fiat feels the small, handy car it is.
Keeping the old 500's proportions has meant widening the track compared with the Panda, which makes the new 500 feel very planted and stable on the road with little body lean in corners. The electric power steering is short of true road feel but it's precise and the 500 can nip around corners with all the easy agility its looks promise. You can play with the cornering line on the accelerator to a degree, and the Fiat will respond accurately and without rubberiness.
It has the feel of a precision instrument, sharper than a Panda 100HP yet considerably more supple over bumps. The big-wheel option (195/45 R16, three designs) heightens that precision, but the smaller wheels (185/55 R15, four designs) give a better ride, more fluid responses and better steering feel. The Sport version has the Sport button found in the Panda 100HP, which firms the steering's weighting and sharpens the throttle response. Other 500s have Fiat's usual City button, which lightens the steering at low speeds.
We drove the 1.3 Multijet turbodiesel and the 1.4 petrol 500s, and both feel pretty keen. The 1.4 is the engine of choice if you're a keen driver, with a 10.5-second 0-62mph time and a 113mph top speed, while the diesel manages 12.5 seconds and 103mph. The base 1.2-litre engine's claimed figures are 12.9 seconds and a modest 99mph.
The 100bhp 1.4 has a crisp, rorty edge to both its sound and its power delivery, and a good spread of pulling ability up to 6,000rpm. It doesn't quite make the 500 into a hot hatchback - the Abarth will fill that need - but it's perky enough for a good time and you get six gears to make the most of it. You need to press the Sport button for maximum enjoyment, though; without it, the throttle response is soggy, especially if you're trying to blip it to smooth a downshift. There's no real reason not to use the Sport mode, because even when it's activated the accelerator's action is smooth and snatch-free.
You'll get a more languid drive in the turbodiesel, but once past some low-speed response lag this is a muscular little engine with enough energy to make you feel good about its meagre fuel thirst. It's also surprisingly smooth and quiet in this application. Lower-powered 500s have drum rear brakes but the 1.4 has discs all round. All have a firm, responsive and progressive pedal feel.
