Uscivi dal salone con l'auto senza averla pagata. Era il 1955
Veicoli Dimenticati | Storie in italiano
43,642 views
In March 1955, at the Geneva Motor Show, Fiat presented the cheapest car you could buy in Italy. Three meters and twenty-one centimeters tall, four actual seats, the engine behind the rear axle to keep the budget down. It cost around 590,000 lire. And almost no Italian had that amount in their pockets.
Yet in fourteen years, 2,695,197 units rolled off the Mirafiori plant, plus approximately 815,000 in Spain and 923,000 in Yugoslavia, where production continued until 1985.
How is this possible? Because at a certain point in Turin, they stopped working on the car and started working on a sheet of paper. This is the story of the Fiat 600: how engineers lowered the price as far as technology allowed, and how a signature at the bottom of a form did the rest. Italy wasn't just powered by a car, but by the way people bought it.
In this video: why the engine ended up in the back, which solutions were tried and discarded, what was really happening in Italian living rooms and kitchens, and how that scheme, conceived to save a few thousand lire, created, two years later, the symbol of Italy around the world.
Video material from the YouTube channel @CentroStoricoFiat.
If you enjoyed the story, like and subscribe to the channel. Let us know in the comments if you had a Seicento in your home and what color it was.
15 Comments
Il problema però era l'estate, quando il caldo creava non pochi problemi al radiatore dell'acqua, che sistemato nel vano posteriore e malgrado la ventola si surriscaldava e dovevi fermarti per fare raffreddare il motore!
Oggi paghi una rata che è un noleggio e la macchina non sarà mai tua
Uscivi dal salone con l'auto senza averla pagata. Era il 1955
Veicoli Dimenticati | Storie in italiano
43,642 views
In March 1955, at the Geneva Motor Show, Fiat presented the cheapest car you could buy in Italy. Three meters and twenty-one centimeters tall, four actual seats, the engine behind the rear axle to keep the budget down. It cost around 590,000 lire. And almost no Italian had that amount in their pockets.
Yet in fourteen years, 2,695,197 units rolled off the Mirafiori plant, plus approximately 815,000 in Spain and 923,000 in Yugoslavia, where production continued until 1985.
How is this possible? Because at a certain point in Turin, they stopped working on the car and started working on a sheet of paper. This is the story of the Fiat 600: how engineers lowered the price as far as technology allowed, and how a signature at the bottom of a form did the rest. Italy wasn't just powered by a car, but by the way people bought it.
In this video: why the engine ended up in the back, which solutions were tried and discarded, what was really happening in Italian living rooms and kitchens, and how that scheme, conceived to save a few thousand lire, created, two years later, the symbol of Italy around the world.
Video material from the YouTube channel @CentroStoricoFiat.
If you enjoyed the story, like and subscribe to the channel. Let us know in the comments if you had a Seicento in your home and what color it was.