A feisty yellow FIAT 500 Sport joined our family on Friday. 🙂 I picked it up from FIAT of Salt Lake City after an on-line chat with Shane revealed a car on their lot configured just like Candy and I had been prepared to special order.
After a tough week at work, I had the “chore” of taking Friday as vacation, flying to Salt Lake City, picking up the car and driving it home.
I have to admit to being a little bit nervous about a road trip in a tiny car, brand spanking new from the dealership. I need not have been. The FIAT 500 is an absolute delight to drive. Like the TARDIS, there must be some weird pan-dimensional physics going on because there is way more room inside than there should be. As for power, despite the FIAT 500’s small motor, just 1.4L, the car had no trouble accelerating to (and through) 85 MPH and cruised neatly at speeds well over 80 MPH all the way across Wyoming and Nebraska. I had strong, gusty winds the whole way but the car felt rock solid. Aided a bit by the tailwind, I drove 1,344 miles home on 39.7 gallons of gas, netting 33.9 MPG with the vast majority of the trip between 80 and 85 MPH!
Being an all interstate trip, I had few chances to do much besides drive straight ahead. I had been worried that the automatic transmission that Candy wanted would destroy the spunky fun of the car but I was wrong; the FIAT 500 is just as much fun with the 6-speed automatic as with the 5-speed manual gearbox. It shifts neatly and reasonably quickly so there were rarely times when I wished for the clutch pedal.
Here are a few more photos (click through for a photo gallery with larger images).
I do need to leave you with one caution. If you are considering a FIAT 500 for your own family, brush up on your parallel parking skills. It’s tough.
Read more in this follow-on posting about the FIAT 500.
i LOVE the parallel parking picture! That thing is so small! Can’t wait to come take it for a test drive 🙂