Category: Small Family 
Price Range: £10,995 to £15,995
Handsome-looking hatchback with good space, nicely finished interior and efficient new 1.4-litre turbocharged petrol engines. Promises to be good value.
Lumpy ride on the biggest wheels, engines could be quieter at speed, no external boot release, optional sat nav has ultra-vague instructions.
A vast improvement over the unloved Stilo but no more than an average car in its class.
Price range likely to be £10,000-£15,000. On sale in UK June 2007.
The Stilo, Fiat's ill-fated attempt to make an Italian Golf rival, is dead. In its place comes a brand-new Bravo, reviving the name of the three-door version of the Stilo's predecessor (the five-door was called Brava). The new car, however, is a five-door only, with styling somewhere between the Grande Punto and how the Brava might have evolved had the Stilo not intervened.
The short bonnet, rounded corners and wedged waistline look very contemporary, and are designed to disguise the distortions forced on new cars by pedestrian protection legislation. Inside there is more padding than usual in a mid-range Fiat plus some rich-feeling materials. Fiat claims class-leading interior space, partly the result of similarly class-beating overall length; the Bravo is quite a hefty car. There's the option of a voice-activated sat-nav and telematics system developed with Microsoft, plus Fiat's usual line-up of trim versions.
Under the shapely skin, styled by Fiat under Frank Stephenson (recently at Ferrari and Maserati, previously at BMW), lies a development of the Stilo platform which was described at the time as a kind of modular, semi-spaceframe construction. Fiat makes no such technical claims this time, but is proud of the fact that the Bravo went from concept-freeze to production in just 18 months - a new record.
This was possible because the great bulk of the design and engineering work, including testing, was done by computer using virtual cars, components and test routines. Real prototypes weren't created until the end of the process, by which time most of the flaws had been fixed and the tooling had been developed. It meant that Fiat could not only speed up development time and cut costs, but also try many more variations of component design before settling on the best solutions.
Five engines will be available from the UK launch in June: a 90bhp, 16-valve 1.4, two turbo petrol 1.4s (dubbed T-Jet) with 120 or 150bhp (also 16-valve), and Fiat's usual pair of 1.9-litre MultiJet turbodiesels with either 120bhp (eight-valve) or 150bhp (16-valve). All except the lower-power diesel have a six-speed gearbox, and the turbo petrol units are part of a nascent trend towards smaller, lighter, more efficient engines as carmakers seek to reduce C02 emissions.
Suspension is by simple struts at the front, a torsion beam at the back, as will also be found on the forthcoming Lancia Delta HPE which shares the Bravo's platform. Alfa Romeo's 149 will also use these underpinnngs but with full multilink rear suspension. A Bravo estate car will join the range in 2010.
