Club Campers Frontier vs Fiat 500X

What's the difference?

Cub Campers is Australia’s oldest camper-trailer manufacturer and one of the oldest businesses in the caravan and camping industry, having just celebrated 50 years of operation in 2018.

The company can lay claim to inventing the soft-floor camper trailer, pioneering the rear-fold and championing off-road campers when everyone else was concerned with the on-road market. Amongst all that, though, it was late to the game when it comes to forward-fold campers, not releasing the Frontier until early in 2016, well after the flood of Chinese manufactured versions became immensely popular. So why did Cub wait so long and was it worth it?

Fiat's indomitable 500 is one of the great survivors - not even VW's recently deceased New Beetle could keep riding the nostalgia wave, partly because it made itself just that little bit out-of-touch by not being a car anyone can buy. The 500 avoided that, particularly in its home market, and is still going strong.

Fiat added the 500X compact SUV a few years ago and at first I thought it was a daft idea. It's a polarising car, partly because some people complain it's capitalising on the 500's history. Well, duh. It's worked out well for Mini, so why not?

I've driven one every year for the last couple so I was keen to see what's up and whether it's still one of the weirdest cars on the road.