Fiat 500 is finally here

The new Fiat 500 is great fun.

The new Fiat 500 is an instantly appealing fun machine.

After five minutes in Fiat's reborn and endlessly vaunted 500, you'd say that on the basis of the looks it draws and general good cheer it engenders, the car is a runaway success. Novelty, of course, has a way of palling. So the good news after living with one for a week is that the Nuovo 500 is not merely viable so much as a cleverly conceived and executed solution to the grimness of the daily urban grind.

As opposed to the cheap and cheerful 1957 original, the new 500 has ample room within for a DINK couple and their yuppie accoutrements or two parents and two children.

It's safe enough, with a five-star NCAP crash rating. It runs lean, especially the diesel. At barely 3.5m in length it parks just about anywhere you care to stick it.

And the top of the petrol range Lounge model we had on loan - with its rev loving but quite tractable 1.4-litre petrol engine - is a smile-inducer not only to behold, but to drive.

Built on the modified platform of a Fiat Panda (which we don't get here) that's to be shared with the next Ford Ka (which we might), the 500 is the reincarnated original front-wheel-drive hatchback. There's a choice of three engines; that 1.4-litre and a 1.2-litre petrol or a1.3 direct-injection turbodiesel.

For now, the latter's available only in uppermost Lounge spec - one of three spec levels along with Pop and Sport - but the diesel is likely to be expanded to more affordable versions. The basic 1.2 Pop starts at $22,990 rising to $28,990 for the Lounge diesel - plus extras, of course. Of necessary fixture only, basic cars miss out on electronic stability program.

A seemingly endless list of accessories and options makes for literally hundreds of thousands of variations and the virtual guarantee that no two 500s will be precisely identical.

That will increase exponentially over the next 18 months or so with the release of the hot Abarth version (99kW powering 990kg), a convertible and a wagon. The latter is to be called - aptly enough for the inner urban types most likely to buy it - Giardinetta (“little garden”).

Ours was a Lounge version replete with such fiddly-dids as voice activation, i-Pod, Bluetooth compatibility and glass roof. For all the bewildering array of bling that can be mixed and matched, it'd be difficult to surpass the ambience of our car with its unadulterated pearl white paint and many-spoked 15-inch alloys.

If the exterior statement is appealing enough, the interior is a minor masterpiece; houndstooth cloth seats, bakelite-evoking plastic trims and exterior-matching dash, large round instruments pod with speed and tacho and purpose made switch gear and old world door handles.

Touches of modernity, such as digital readout, are unobtrusively functional.

The manual's gearstick (the alternative transmission is a robotised manual with an automatic drive mode), is high mounted so that it falls readily to hand, its shift quality creamy smooth and easy to row.

It all falls just short of perfection, though. The plastics beneath the dash are cheaper and sharper edged, the steering wheel lacks telescopic adjustment. That's mitigated to some extent by the button-activated sport mode, which sharpens feel through the wheel and throttle response. With the electronic steering system otherwise decidedly bantamweight, there's little reason not to stay in sport mode.

It's been seven days since the car went back to Fiat and even now I'm missing the 500's precision and agility. Weighing in at just under the tonne unladen, the 1.4 engine with its tasty note getsit to 100km/h from standing in a little over10 seconds - hardly fast on the face of it, butit always feels quicker.

It loves revving right up to 6600rpm and sounds better for it, but will pull more than adequately from low speed in fourth. The upgunned Abarth, due next year, should be a blast.

If the ride on 15s is busy bordering on terse, the 500 feels supple over bumps and pitted bitumen. Doing the freeway limit in sixth gear at 3000rpm, there's no lack of wind and road noise, if not enough to detract from its obvious capability for the long haul. It stops fairly handily too. The brake pedal feel is firm but progressive, though the stoppers are induced to whine a little too readily.

Before the re-launch of its passenger car, Fiat was widely held to be the acronym of “Fix it again, Tony”. That stems from the era when if affordable Italian cars were not either overheating or exploding, they could almost be heard gently rusting. If the Punto has gone some way toward addressing that perception, the 500 looks and feels to be stradas ahead again.

Quality and reliability are subjects of longer term assessment than seven days, but what we can say is the 500 is an instantly appealing and very rapidly addictive blend of fun, practicality and retro chic. Would I have one? Certamente.