RE: SOTW: Fiat 126 BIS

[The_Burg]

dinkel said:

VladD said:

Ah, rear engined FIATs. I learnt to drive in one of these:



FIAT 850 sport coupe. Great little car.

Uncle had one. Those cars look great.

I had one as my first car, me and a mate payed £20 for it and thrashed it round the local quarry.
revved to around 8000rpm too i seem to remember.
Seized up and was scrapped, made £5 profit. Scrappy made quite a bit more.... didn't realise at the time they were quite rare!

[superstonks]

Looks like the lotus ones air cooled like the original - as theres no hose fitted to the water pump inlet!

[3Dom]

Twincam16 said:

dinkel said:

Original Panda: now that is something else.

That comment and this car have got me thinking - I actually reckon the 126, original Panda (especially if it's the early one with the offset radiator grille) and Cinquecento are cooler than the traditional 500/600 and the 'nuova' 500 (yes, I know the Cinquecento was marketed in Italy as the 'Nuova 500' but I'm just going off what's written on the back - you all know which car I mean).

The original 500 has a lot of charm but it's all a bit cliched - yes, so it conjures up images of Audrey Hepburn and Brigette Bardot driving them around without any shoes on in the dusty streets of San Remo in the late '50s whilst Richard Burton fires up a Riva Aquarama and stubs out a Capstan, but they've picked up this godawful 'Hoxton' image since. The people most likely to drive them nowadays are urban 'trendy' media types who say their favourite film is La Dolce Vita because they've got a framed original foyer poster in the hallway of their 'looks scruffy and smells of baby-sick but it's worth £2mill' Notting Hill flat. People who say 'dahhlink' a lot and do that air-kissing thing when they meet anyone they're even vaguely acquainted with.

The new one looks like an oochie-coochie-coo attempt to emulate it. I think it's a good car and I praise Fiat for making it properly small, but it's a bit cartoonish and self-consciously cute. The four-wheeled equivalent of batted eyelashes and a 'baby-voice'.

But the 126, Panda and Cinquecento have a more minimalist, industrial feel to them, nothing superfluous about their design. They go well with minimalist interiors and modern art and suggest that the owner appreciates the design concepts behind them rather than their film-garnished image. Also, the Cinquecento Sporting is the only '90s hot hatch you don't readily associate with blaring drum 'n' bass.

Also works for Vespas. Original Vespas looking like some rip-off of Jimmy's from Quadrophrenia, festooned with Who logos, targets and mirrors, look a bit desperate these days, like some beer-gutted bloke in an Elvis costume chatting up a twentysomething barmaid. The 're-launch' Vespas seem to be ridden by hatchet-faced, power-suited 'modern business' types trying to convince the world they have a personality.

But the square-headlight '70s/'80s models - they're actually cooler in my eyes:



People associate Italy with all this flowing, classically-inspired organic design and bang on and on about inheriting the Rennaissance values of truth and beauty etc, but there's another side to Italy, with a vast chemical industry, that produces starkly man-made-looking objects, using lots of plastic in deliberately artificial-looking colours. The Italy that gave us the Lancia Stratos, Lamborghini Countach and Ferrari 348, the output of Luigi Colani and Marco Zanuso. The origins of Kartell furniture, Artimide lighting and Brionvega 'cube' TVs and record players - and I love it.

I hear what you're saying. I have a 1972 500 and a 1974 126, love them both to bits. The 126 has been sat in drive not running for nearly 3 years (will be resurrected this summer), I use the 500 as my daily driver and have done for nearly 6 years. Rust is of course getting the better of it, though the filler and 'fastglass' are doing their bit to keep it going!

When I first got it (shipped over through family in Sicily) parts were really cheap on evilBay and I could pretty much get hold of anything for really good money. Over the past few years (particularly since the release of the new 500)the parts have all of a sudden become really scarce and expensive, as so many people are now choosing to adopt the 'Hoxton image' and make it pristine for a sunny Sunday drive. All the while sacrificing many 126's in the process as pretty much the complete running gear from the air-cooled 126 is interchangeable in the 500. The exact same thing happened with Vespas a while back, where shops such as 'Scooter Emporium', (co-incidentally just a stones throw from Hoxton, but the shop has now shut down - possible due to exhausted supply) would buy scooters for pittance from the continent, give them a shiny lick of pink paint and then resell them for at least a 500% mark up (of course it's good business, and not their fault)!

Apologies for this becoming a rant as I am a bit bitter, not being able to afford the 're-built' examples that the trendy fad generation can just buy without a care...

Anyways, the 126 is a cool cool little car. There are without question 1000s of better cars, but there is something about the package that just makes it just so. Perhaps it is it's 50+ year old technology or it's unique boxy looks, but it just has something, and for such a bargain price.

[Twincam16]

3Dom said:

Apologies for this becoming a rant as I am a bit bitter, not being able to afford the 're-built' examples that the trendy fad generation can just buy without a care...

I understand completely, but I guess I'm also saying that perhaps the design and engineering ethos that produced things from the '70s, '80s and early '90s, and the latent appreciation of it rather than the whole 'Hoxton Arts Scene' faddiness, is just as readily accepted in a way.

I've recently read A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr, in which he gets a lot more opinionated and pulls no punches when compared to the TV series. I especially liked his complaints regarding the way the postmodern era treats the '60s as a kind of sugar-coated dreamworld we seem to autistically cling onto as an ideal whilst avoiding the fact that so many other decades have more to offer - and that we seem to attribute a lot to the '60s that would be more correctly associated with the '50s and '70s.

Nowadays car and 'bike companies try and make products that look as '60s as possible. In the '60s, '70s, '80s and early '90s they were actually trying to make cars look as futuristic as possible, which is why a 1972 motor show punter, still blinking and pinching himself after laying eyes on the Countach prototype, would find it absurd that anyone would think of trying to vainly revisit the past in the form of a bloated Mini or Beetle facsimile.

As Michael Bracewell noted, 'retro is doomed, we're running out of past'. Ironically, in order to get back on track, this may involve having to revisit the early '90s, and a time before New Labour managed to get the entire country to 'disengage brain' as though it was good for us.

I remember the future. I think we left it in 1996.

[Pulse]

Damn, it's sold! I wanted it!

[CDP]

Twincam16 said:

there's another side to Italy, with a vast chemical industry, that produces starkly man-made-looking objects, using lots of plastic in deliberately artificial-looking colours. .

This is why I far prefer the new Panda to the 500. It's the real thing and not trying to hark to the past. Like that inexpensive plastic Italian kitchenware you get in flamboyant colours, the half of Italy that still looks to the future.

Hopefully we are moving away from our retro phase, the new Jaguars are prime examples. Don't worry about what the Americans will think, there are enough of them with good taste to buy the modern.

[dinkel]

Twincam16 said:

dinkel said:

Original Panda: now that is something else.

That comment and this car have got me thinking

The Panda never made it to the best-compact-car shortlist. Never made it to the Beetle, 2CV, Mini, DS, etc list. But IMO it's one of the last true originals.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY8o14n7Fdc

I like to add the '82 Audi 100.

[CDP]

dinkel said:

Twincam16 said:

dinkel said:

Original Panda: now that is something else.

That comment and this car have got me thinking

The Panda never made it to the best-compact-car shortlist. Never made it to the Beetle, 2CV, Mini, DS, etc list. But IMO it's one of the last true originals.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY8o14n7Fdc

I like to add the '82 Audi 100.

It's features like completely flat glass to make it and cheap seats with washable covers. What a good idea in a family car.

Apparently the basic Italian market car didn't even get a heater and the earliest home-market models got the 704cc twin from the 126Bis - which is probably the real reason for that engine's existence.

[dinkel]

My wife drives a Dacia Logan. I see that as a grown up Panda.

[Alfa_75_Steve]

dinkel said:

My wife drives a Dacia Logan. I see that as a grown up Panda.

Not even close.

The Logan is fairly advanced, being based on current Clio oily bits - it's nowhere near as stripped down to the bare essentials.

[kamilb1998]

lydian said:

adycav said:

Oh wow...my Mum had one of these, a red one!

I haven't seen one for years.

Yep my mum too, although it was a horrid turquoise colour!!!!!!!!!!!

My mum had one too; aircooled 650 in white.

[LukeSi]

o0 first car material.