And speaking of Mr. Stephenson:

"Great news for the whole 500 wants you Community, and for everyone else: the wait for the 500 will be only seven months! The car's launch will now be brought forward, ahead of the initial date set for September 2007."

Want to design your own Fiat 500? Check it out here and go to Concept Lab II.

 

I really like the range in the color pallet they are using (could do without quite as much pastel feel to it, but that may be the interface). Granted it's a configurator for customizing and not actual production colors, but even so, it is nice to see actual color and not just the colors in the MINI color pallet: really light silver, light silver, silver, dark silver, darker silver, darkest silver, light blue, blue, dark blue.

 

Apparently there was a Concept Lab I...I think they were up to more of the same. Interesting way to generate ideas/enthusiasm.

 

Nice. A classic Abarth is on my short list of cars that I need to own before I die.

 

U.S. sales...yes or no? Will anybody ever trust a Fiat over here again???

In any case it will be fun to watch a launch of another updated classic, especially if Mr. Stephenson was involved.

 

maybe

 

I had never heard of a Fiat 500. Kinda like a Mini, but they make the classic minis seem enormously over-powered . The pic on Wikipedia of the new one looked like it could be a fun car, but hopefully they won't be too anemic for us here in the U. S. They finally had, by 1975, worked their way up to 23HP!

 

I confess, I miss those days. The hp wars in production cars is getting old.

 

The Fiat 500 has always been a car I've wanted to own. There is a guy near me with a turquoise one, we pass each other pretty regularly and we always wave and beep.
Annette

 

So, to get this straight, we are going from this:


To this:


...under Fiat's chief designer, Frank Stephenson, who gave us the MINI.

 

I went to the design site, and while it was alot of fun, the new 500 doesn't really do much for me.
I'll take an old Fiat Topolino, though.

Annette

 

Interesting that, under Frank Stephenson's direction (one might assume), the new 500 has sloping headlights which are somewhat similar to the headlights on the R56 MINI, where have proven to be a bit controversial.

Overall, it'll be fun to watch the new Fiat 500 launch (at least from a distance) especially given it's ties to the designer of the R50/53 MINI.

 

what happens if you already made one??

 

just an FYI the Fiat 500 configurator is online as of today ... great stuff in the MINI style tradition
http://www.fiat500.com/videoconf/main.asp?lang=IT
it's in Italian, but very intuitive ...

 

Interesting article on the Fiat 500 on MotoringFile here.