Review: 2013 Fiat 500e

Filed under: Hatchback, New Car Reviews, Electric, Fiat

A Juice Box With Style And Substance

It happens nearly every day, and as often as not, I’m the guilty party: someone slips an eBay Motors or Craigslist link into the fetid automotive stew that is the Autoblog editors’ online chatroom. Typically, it’s enough to momentarily derail an otherwise productive dialog about editing a breaking news item or researching an arcane bit of automotive history. Predictably, we’ve all got our favorites. Once dubbed “Mr. Other Makes” by a former coworker and friend who noticed my penchant for four-wheeled eBay esoterica, I can’t help but spend at least a few minutes trawling the online classifieds every night before I go to bed, staring glassy-eyed at some basketcase Bitter SC, Inca-wheeled Saab 99 Turbo, a moonshot Plymouth Road Runner Superbird or resuming my quest to seek out the world’s last remaining unmolested first-gen Nissan Sentra SE-R.

Every Autoblog staffer has their peccadilloes, Editor-in-Chief John Neff among them. His classified quests skew toward larger sport sedans that discreetly package big performance. As the former owner of a first-gen Ford Taurus SHO Plus, Neff is a serial viewer of Pontiac G8, Audi S6, Lincoln LS V8 and BMW M5 listings. Yet the current apple of his eye is the 500E. No, not the bubbly electric Fiat shown here that shares its name, but rather the imposing 1991-1994 Mercedes-Benz E-Class, a hand-built V8 monster developed and assembled with Porsche acting as Daimler’s skunkworks. A rare car, its values are starting to escalate, a reality that has Neff closer than ever to pulling the trigger.

This 2013 Fiat 500e is actually something of a skunkworks project, too. Unable or unwilling to commit the man hours of its own engineers and equipment to a project that it knew was doomed to be a money loser, like Mercedes, Fiat farmed out much of the model’s development process to a German performance specialist, Bosch. The supplier developed the battery, motor and power electronics for the 500e, although Fiat is quick to assert it still had to connect all the disparate divisions of the tier-one company to bring the project together. That sort of development could have yielded a patchwork final product, an embarrassing cut-and-shut Frankensteined version of the standard Cinquecento. Yet word is that the 500e is actually superior to its gas-powered cousins. So which is it? I decided to spend a week with one to find out.

Continue reading 2013 Fiat 500e

2013 Fiat 500e originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 20 Aug 2013 11:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments