Which it will be the future of the thermal Fiat 500? The small Turin city car seems to be faced with a decision that could in any case overturn it: let’s discover the possible options at play together.
The “guilt” is one of the new safety standard regulations, the so-called GSR IIwhich obliges all cars produced by July 6, 2024 forward to being equipped with specific technologies, something that the current Fiat 500 (the thermal one) does not possess.
So what to do? The first optionthe most risky and the one that at the moment the upper levels of Stellantis are absolutely not taking into consideration, is that of permanently delete the little 500 from the price lists. You might think “A little bad”, given the presence of the electric 500, but this would still risk losing thousands of customers and therefore a good share of the market. The problem is that the battery-powered city car It’s not very successful, and this is demonstrated by the fact that in Mirafiori the workers are still on layoffs precisely because of the poor sales of the 500e and Maserati. The electric 500 sells a lot in France and is performing well in Germany, but in Italy the numbers are in sharp declineconsequently there is a risk of further reducing the workers’ workload with all that entails.
L’option 2 instead provides a thermal update to GSR II standards, the most logical idea at the moment. A part of the investments is allocated to improving the “small”, adapting it to the new regulations and ensuring that it continues to circulate on European roads. It is the most logical hypothesis at the moment and at the same time the simplest, a bit like what happened with the Panda, after the Pandina was presented a few weeks ago, the most technological and smartest ever, equipped with all the ADAS required by regulations.
Finally theoption 3, that of producing a 500 BEV in Mirafiori but with a combustion engine. Even if at the moment there is no official information in this sense, Tavares has announced a 100 million euro investment in the new electric 500, which will involve modernizing it with a view to reducing costs, and perhaps a hybrid version. Among other things the 4th July it will be the anniversary of the Fiat 500 and who knows whether that occasion might not be propitious for an announcement with great fanfare. The problem of making electricity thermal is on one side the adaptation of the production lineeven if many insiders are convinced that it can be done, and on the other hand, time, given that a new 500 “Thermal BEV” it would not be placed on the market until 2026. These therefore seem to be the three most credible hypotheses, we await news on the matter, hoping that they will arrive in the next few weeks.
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