2024 Fiat 500e (Red)
Price: $42,190 CAD ($34,750 after government rebates)
Colour: Red
After 3 years of reviewing new vehicles, I have come to realize I love small cars or huge stuff (pickups and big boy SUV’s). The mid-size SUV nonsense in the middle holds little interest at this point. Every time I see a European Super Mini then, my heart aches. It’s not my lifetime of poor dietary choices coming back to haunt me but has more to do with my love of this type of car. Given that I live in Canada, we don’t get a lot of truly small cars. As a consumer market, we won’t buy them, which is why no carmaker really sells them here. One of the only options that’s been readily available is the Mitsubishi Mirage and that is not a great example of the breed. Imagine my surprise then when Stellantis announced they would be reinvigorating the Fiat brand with an all new 500. This one would be a Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV). I expected then that it would follow suit with other variants in the 500 lineup over the year and be bigger than the little hatch that started it all in North America years ago. Instead, Fiat has gone the other way and committed itself to the tiny car they sell elsewhere in the world. It’s a proper 2-door, four-seater (sort of), chic European Super Mini… what the hell?
Most of the super mini stuff we see in North America are sad cars. They’re cheap and disappointing. I like inexpensive, but cheap I can’t abide unless the price point really reflects it. Imagine my surprise then when I climbed inside the new 500e. It was quite nice. I wasn’t hit in the face by cheap plastics or other obvious compromises that downgraded the vehicle (the only exception is the carpet which is cheap nonsense). You get a decent infotainment unit that has CarPlay and Android Auto. You also get a wireless charger (to be used carefully in a small BEV but it’s there) and it has a skyline image of Turino, Italy where the car is produced. The simple all digital dash cluster is also serviceable and easy to read. You get very stylish fabric seats that are remarkably comfortable. The rear storage is laughable with the second row in place, but you’d never really haul anyone around back there anyway so leave them down and things get way better. Space for the driver and front passenger is excellent and visibility is incredible.
It’s on the performance front that the 500e is going to take some lumps. People whine constantly about the limited range per charge (roughly 200kms) and the limited power on offer. I think though that people are missing the point. The 500e isn’t about massive range or power, it’s for driving in the city. North American ignorance won’t allow us to buy a car built to purpose but demands we buy cars built to stroke our egos. The average Canadian commute is somewhere around 40kms/day. This means you’d get 3 days or so of driving if you observe the 10-80% charging parameter that’s generally accepted for BEV’s. You can also charge this thing at home, on a standard outlet and charge nearly 50% of the battery overnight. If you largely drive to work and back with a little puttering around town for groceries, this is the car for you. You truly don’t need anything else. It won’t fly as your only car, but any 2-car family will make great use of this thing and if you charge it at home, it’s going to cost you next to nothing to run it. It’s also remarkably nimble around town as the electric torque comes in handy when you’re bobbing in and out of traffic. I didn’t feel the 117hp was a problem and really enjoyed my time behind the wheel.
The sad reality is that nobody is going to buy the 2024 Fiat 500e. I know this. You know this. How Stellantis doesn’t know this is beyond me. Currently, the 500e is the only Fiat vehicle you can buy in Canada, and this means the brand isn’t likely long for these shores when it fails to sell. This is a shame as the 500e is a vehicle we should be buying. It’s the cheapest BEV on the market (yes, the incentives make this work but for the moment they’re here and are a factor) and if you can put aside our aggressive, ignorant, North American prejudice against small and practical cars, we’d see what a good choice this is. We don’t need an oversized, massive SUV to go to work and back nor do we need the costs that come with it. What we need are simple, workable cars that do what we need them to. In that instance, the 500e is nearly perfect.
