Fiat 600: A “World Car” Before the Term Existed

It’s been nearly 20 years since I lost my grandfather. Still, plenty of things he used to do or say remain etched in my memory, including this seemingly mundane sentence: “Had someone told me when I was your age that one day I would have my very own car, I would have never believed it.”

These were the simple words of a simple man. Yet they’ve stayed with me all this time because they’re such a powerful reminder of just how much life in my country changed over the 20th century.

Born in Sicily in the early 1920s, my grandfather grew up in a nation that, despite the period regime’s delusions of grandeur, remained a largely poor, agrarian society. Spurred by the government, Fiat tried to broaden the market with cars like the 508 “Balilla” and the 500 “Topolino,” but even those remained a pipe dream for most of the population. As late as 1937, only about 270,000 cars roamed Italy’s roads versus a population of roughly 43 million inhabitants. No wonder my grandfather couldn’t even imagine ever owning one!

The conditions for a thriving mass automotive market in the country only began to materialize by the mid-1950s, as Italy went through a period of explosive economic growth that saw it double its GDP within a decade. And Fiat’s new baby, the 600, presented 70 years ago at the Geneva Motor Show, was just the right car at the right time.

Work on the 600 began at Fiat’s Turin headquarters in late 1951. The idea was to replace the outdated 500 “Topolino” with a more modern and efficient design capable of seating four in reasonable comfort. These requirements soon led Fiat’s chief engineer, Dante Giacosa, to settle for a rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive configuration. It was lighter and more space-efficient than the traditional front-engine/rear-drive configuration yet cheaper to make than a front-wheel drive layout. Air-cooled “V” configuration engines and even a semiautomatic gearbox were all experimented with but ultimately canned in favor of a more traditional water-cooled inline-four with a manual four-speed. The suspensions were independent on all four corners, with swing axles and coil springs at the rear and two simple “A” arms with a single transverse leaf spring at the front.

Launched with a retail price of 590,000 Lire (roughly equivalent to $10,000 today), the Fiat 600 arrived just as Italy’s post-war economic boom was lifting millions out of poverty. Thus, it succeeded where all its predecessors had failed: putting the country on wheels, just as Ford’s Model T had done with the U.S. decades before.

The first 600s were equipped with a 633-cubic centimeter engine rated at just 21 horsepower, and they maxed out at 60 mph. That’d be decidedly unimpressive today, but was plenty when the alternative was the sidewalk, and soon enough, Fiat’s biggest problem was coping with demand.

Indeed, the 600’s lifespan saw the Italian new car market grow nearly tenfold, from just 162,000 units in ’55 to over 1.3 million in 1970, when the last models rolled off the Mirafiori production line. By then, over 2.5 million 600s had been made. But the impact of this little Fiat would extend far beyond that, in both time and space.

In May of 1957, the Spanish national automaker SEAT began producing the 600 under license in its Barcelona factory. These early Spanish 600s were all but identical to their Italian equivalent, save for minor trim and badging differences, but the two models’ paths would soon diverge. The Spanish cars got the uprated 767cc engine in 1963, three years after the Italian ones did, and kept the rear-hinged “suicide” doors until as late as 1970, six years after the Fiats had switched to front-hinged ones. Speaking of doors, we must mention the SEAT 800, a four-door derivative with no equivalent in the Fiat range, built on a wheelbase stretched by about seven inches and offered only between 1964 and 1967.

By the time the last SEAT 600 rolled off the Barcelona factory in August of 1973, the “Pelotilla” (one of the many nicknames the Spanish have given to the 600) over 800,000 units had been built and it had become a fixture in the Iberian country’s landscape. Much as it happened in Italy, the arrival of the 600 on the Spanish market coincided with a period of sustained economic growth, sparked by a series of economic reforms that opened up the Spanish economy and put the little car within reach of an ever-increasing number of people.

The Fiat 600 was also assembled in other countries, like Germany, Colombia, and Argentina. But by far and away, the country it called home the longest was one that doesn’t exist anymore: Yugoslavia.

Fiat had signed a cooperation agreement with state-owned company Zastava in 1954, and the first 600s started rolling off the production line in Kragujevac by October of the following year. In contrast to their Italian brethren, the cars built by Zastava dropped the “600” moniker for “750” once the larger 767cc engine came online in 1960, and retained the rear-hinged doors until 1969. After that, the Zastava 750 remained in production with minor improvements until as late as 1985, by which time over 900,000 had been produced.

Nowadays, the Fiat 600 seems to live in the shadow of the smaller 500 in the international collector car market. Over time, the latter has grown to be recognized as an industrial design masterpiece, gained a place in the MoMA’s permanent collection, and has become as much of an Italian national stereotype as pizza and gelato. But, while that’s all right and proper, I’d argue the 600 has been by far the most influential of the two.

A “world car” before the term was even invented, the 600 sparked the mass motorization of not just one but at least three countries, carrying on its tiny four wheels the hopes and dreams of millions of people. And if that’s not a legacy worth celebrating, I don’t know what is.

Buon compleanno piccolina!

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Matteo Licata received his degree in Transportation Design from Turin’s IED (Istituto Europeo di Design) in 2006. He worked as an automobile designer for about a decade, including a stint in the then-Fiat Group’s Turin design studio, during which his proposal for the interior of the 2010–20 Alfa Romeo Giulietta was selected for production. He next joined Changan’s European design studio in Turin and then EDAG in Barcelona, Spain. Licata currently teaches automobile design history to the Transportation Design bachelor students of IAAD (Istituto di Arte Applicata e Design) in Turin.