Fiat 500

Published · Researched 2026-09-21

Fiat 500 — Review

The Fiat 500 is three cars now, and the badge on the back doesn't tell you which one you're buying. There's the old petrol one (2007–2024, dead now), the electric one (2020–, the one to actually consider), and the brand-new hybrid (on sale since November 2025, zero owner data). Get them mixed up and you'll buy the wrong car.

Start with the electric 500e, because it's the surprise. Everyone expected Fiat's first ground-up EV to be a styling exercise with a battery wedged in, and instead owners keep saying the same thing: it just works. A UK owner after a year of mostly town driving reports 195 miles of predicted range in summer, 165 when it's cold, and a 175-mile mixed trip completed with 20% to spare. Only 12% of owners reported any fault in the first year — below the survey average. That's not a typo. The little Fiat is, by the data, more reliable than its reputation suggests.

What's genuinely good: it's the right size for the job. It parks anywhere, the 42kWh version's real-world 235–260km covers a week of city driving, it charges at 85kW DC (fine for a city car), and the interior is genuinely lovely — the 10.25-inch screen, the retro-modern dash. It's quiet, it's nippy, and running costs are pocket money. Owners love the way it looks the way people love a good dog: irrationally and completely.

What's actually wrong is software and calibration, not the electric bits. The app is glitchy. The Kiri rewards coins never worked properly. Audio-system false warnings pop up and need resetting. One Australian long-term test found the brake calibration genuinely unpleasant — friction brakes grabbing while the car's still rolling, jerky hill starts, "terrible and unsafe when reversing down my steep driveway". Spurious passenger-airbag warnings that disabled one-pedal driving. None of this strands you; all of it annoys you. The drivetrain itself — battery, motor — has no systemic failures in the owner record. Buy the car for the hardware, tolerate the software.

Then there's the depreciation story, which is your opportunity. The 500e launched at nearly £30k for a well-specced one, the lifestyle marketing was dialled to eleven, and then the used market did what it does to expensive small EVs: it fell off a cliff. It was one of Britain's fastest-falling used cars in spring 2023. A 2022 Icon with the big battery now changes hands around £10,000. That's a three-year-old, 4-star-Euro-NCAP electric car for the price of a used petrol Fiesta. The Abarth 500e — the one with the fake exhaust noise played through an exterior speaker, which is exactly as silly as it sounds — lost 25% in ten months. Buy used, never new.

The classic petrol 500 (2007–2024) is a different proposition: a simple, cheap, cheerful city car whose owners forgive everything because it costs nothing to run. 48mpg, £120 brake jobs, hubcaps that fall off and paint you can see through in the boot. "They feel cheap because they are... I did enjoy the drive though." Buy a late 1.0 mild-hybrid (2023, ~£9.7k), not an old TwinAir. Production ended in 2024, so every one you see is used.

The new 500 Ibrida — the electric body with a 70hp 1.0 mild-hybrid and a proper 6-speed manual, built in Turin from €17,000 — is the car Fiat hopes will save its Italian factories. It might be great. Nobody knows. There is no owner data, no reliability record, nothing. If a dealer tells you otherwise, they're selling you a brochure.

The social pulse: 500e owners are quietly smug early adopters; classic-500 owners are affectionate lifers ("I adore my Fiat 500, even with its 8.5L/100km in the city," as one Threads user put it). The press verdict on the electric sums it up: fundamentally flawed, bursting with charm.

Value call: the sweet spot is a 2022 500e with the 42kWh battery — post-launch-year, software sorted, roughly £10k–13k in the UK. Skip 2021 (launch-year airbag software recall, first-run glitches) and skip the 24kWh version unless it's a pure second car. Nearest alternatives: the Mini Electric (better to drive, worse range for the money), the Honda e (dead, don't), the Renault Zoe (0-star NCAP, absolutely not). For the petrol classic: 2023 1.0 MHEV, skip old TwinAirs. For the Ibrida: wait a year and let other people debug it.

Buy the electric one used, the petrol one late, and the hybrid one later. The 500 rewards patience more than most cars.