Is Fiat the world’s worst car or just one of the worst?
Discuss among yourselves.
When you rent a car in Italy and want an automatic, the choices are very limited. For the duration of this trip so far I’ve been a passenger in a Fiat, and right from the start the transmission sounded like rattling junk and felt like a mildly bucking bronco.
Last night the car simply stopped. Made a dreadful sound for a moment, and then cut out. Fortunately, it happened as we arrived at a restaurant in a 2-car caravan, with one member who speaks fluent Italian. So the call to the car rental people went fairly smoothly, and someone actually came to take a look at it after about an hour and a half of relatively pleasant waiting in the restaurant.
The person who arrived pronounced the car unsalvageable on inspection, and towed it away (down a big long hill, of course). I waved that vehicle good-bye with nary a regret, happy to see it go.
Since I’m with so many other people I may not even need a car again in Italy, because the tail end of the trip will be spent in Rome and the plan all along was to drop the car off before the Rome segment.
So, what’s up with Fiats?
FIAT – Fix it again Tony
FORD – Found on road dead
Just two, I’m sure there are more.
om:
My 7-year-old Ford Fusion’s been a great car.
Fiat’s are notoriously unreliable, even in the new incarnation. Among Italian made cars Fiat is the lowest of the low in terms of performance and quality. I actually just sold a 1978 Fiat 124 Spider (convertible). Owned it for 22 years. It was a summer car for me, I only took it out in favorable weather and stashed it away in my garage from early October through late April. Averaged about 1,000 miles per year and usually had to do between $100 – $200 worth of repairs annually. I would never, ever take it on long trips or when I needed to be able to rely on getting to or from a place.
Fiats have always had poor durability and reliability, with only a few models produced over their long lifetime that did not give their owners heartburn.
My first car was 1972 Fiat 128, just delightful to drive and lots of room and practicality, but made with sheet steel from Yugoslavia that was weak and prone to quickly rusting. Fuel pumps, exhausts, and radiators failed regularly in the four years I owned it. Sold it after 60k miles, the second owner had complete cylinder head failure six months later. I replaced it with a used 1974 Fiat 128, the newly imposed emissions controls made it a thirsty and grumpy beast, I traded it in on another make after four months.
Years ago the Italian market was protected, and Italians only drove about 5-6k miles a year, while Germans drove 14k and Americans 12k. Fiats were not built for durability because owners did not keep them to high mileage.
Fiat had some brilliant engineers, but their management and production people were hopelessly behind the times until just the recent decades, they have never managed to catch up. Combine Fiat with Chrysler in the current Fiat Chrysler Auto and you have two long-time underperformers with a track record of poor reliability and durability.
Crap, om already hit the “Fix It Again Tony!”. That was my total contribution to the subject.
I had a Fiat in the late 1970s, standard transmission, was a good car to drive for a while but yeah, broke down or needed repairs all the time. Sold it within a year.
I’m one of those lame people who never really learned to drive a manual transmission so when we road tripped in Italy ten years ago they gave me a Benz B-Class, a smaller model but not as small as the A-class. It was never sold in the US until an electric version appeared a few years ago.
I’m fascinated by the different kinds of cars sold and driven in different places. Besides brands not sold here Toyota, Honda, Ford, etc. sell models not sold here. Lots of quirky little cars in Europe. Even Civics and Corollas are different over there.
You see a lot of Fiats in SoCal these days. I guess because they are cheap. My daughter considered one for grand daughter until I told her to check reliability stats, whence she changed her mind.
Wife and I rented a Fiat in Munich back in the 60s and drove it to Naples. It was fun to drive, and we didn’t have any problems in the few days we spent with it. It did just fine driving through the Alpine passes.
European driving took some mental adjustments, however. For instance the habit in Germany of passing into oncoming traffic on two lane highways–assuming that the on coming car will move to the edge of the wide highway. I will never forget going down the auto strada all out in the Fiat at about 110 -120 (kmh) and hearing a high pitched whine, followed by a Maserati, or such, blowing our doors off. I will also never forget driving in places like downtown Milan, where the street may be marked for four lanes and there were 7 or 8 lanes of traffic.
When I was in Italy some years back, we rented a Mercedes. On the Autostrada, we were going 120 km/hour and getting passed like we were standing still. Then we would come to a Fiat with a “60” sticker in the window. At that time (I haven’t driven there in a few years), there was a minimum speed on the Autostrada, no maximum. The Fiat was exempt because it could not go that fast, so they had “60 stickers in the back window.
I checked my rear view mirror and passed the Fiat. Before I got around it, I had a Ferrari on my rear bumper blowing his horn. He must have been going 200 until I got in his way.
” I will also never forget driving in places like downtown Milan, where the street may be marked for four lanes and there were 7 or 8 lanes of traffic.”
In Rome they drive on the sidewalk all the time. I did not drive in cities.
I had the pleasure of renting a SEAT in the late ’50s to drive south to Torremolinos; good thing I was young and foolhardy – and could speak a bit of Spanish.
In the early ’70s I also had the pleasure(?) of owning a Fiat 124 Spider, in NYC yet!
By way of comparison… well, let’s just say the Fiat always got where it was going in a reasonable time frame; it’s a wonder I’m still not in Spain somewhere north of Málaga.
I come at this from a different angle, survivability.
Fiats and other tiny little European “smart” cars may well be OK in Europe, with higher gas prices, its often very high density, congested cities, and horrible parking problems–on a recent visit to Rome I was amazed to see a few of these little cars “parked” in between other normally parked cars by being wedged in perpendicular to the sidewalk, in a space that could not fit them if parked the regular way.
But, here in the U.S.. I view these little cars as “death traps” once they are out on the road, at high speed, and in competition with big trucks, Suburbans, and SUVs.
Be in one of these little bugs and get hit by one of the big boys, and you don’t stand a chance.
Your Italian car rental woes remind me of a book by Alexander McCall Smith, “My Italian Bulldozer.” When the protagonist’s car rental reservation was “lost.” he ended up having to rent a bulldozer for his sojourn in Tuscany. A charming story in which the mistaken rental reservation turned out to be a fortuitous event. Driving a bulldozer in Italy has its benefits. Not the least of which is its reliability. 🙂
In my experience Fiat has always been an unreliable brand. It has a certain Italian flair, but is carelessly manufactured. Italians are great lovers, not manufacturers. Leave that to the Germans.
In New York, it’s an acronym for Fix It All the Time. My brother owned a used one for about a year, ca. 1976. Handsome aesthetically. From a distance, Italy seems that way generally. Attend to aesthetics (a good thing, truly), but neglect function.
JJ, “My Italian Bulldozer” was my introduction to A. M. Smith, what a hoot. I went on to enjoy several of his other books.
Back in the mid-70s I owned a Fiat X 1/9. It was a two-seat sports car, very nice looking, but it started acting up almost immediately. Never did get it to run right.
That’s when one of my buddies in the Navy told me “Fiat is an acronym for Futile Italian Attempt at Transportation”.
J.J.
Italians are great lovers, not manufacturers. Leave that to the Germans.
Which reminds me of the Heaven and Hell jokes.
Version 1
Version 2
One read: hell is where the traffic patterns are Bostonian. 🙂 No argument from me, though I would add hell is drivers inside Route 128. Neo, having recently driven in Italy, might beg to differ.
Apparently there is no disagreement about policemen, though I can’t say I am enamored of what I have read about British cops in the last 10 years.
Italian cars might not be very good, but (at least in Tuscany) the roads are a symphony for wheels.
Well, to get a worse automobile, you’d probably have to look to old East Bloc manufactured cars. East Germany’s Trabant, I understand, was pretty horrible.
For an absolutely hilarious story about driving, try James Thurber’s “A Ride with Olympy”.
My dad would always suggest that if you bought anything European you should buy 2 so that you would have 1 to drive while the other was with the mechanic.
He knew folks who had even had a bad run with the notoriously “good” brands from Europe…so he was staunchly a GM man. 😉
so he was staunchly a GM man.
My sister’s 1979 Chevette was a hazard to drive by the end of 1981.
In the early ‘70s I went to a summer school in Erice, Sicily which is an ancient mountain town. One day, four of us decided to go to the beach, so we hopped into the Fiat one of the guys had rented and started down the mountain. About a third of the way down the engine quit on a road with no services. We solved that by coasting to the bottom in neutral. When we opened the hood, it was clear that the distributor cap had fallen off. Despite having no tools, we managed to get it firmly back on and spent the rest of the day at the beach. Remarkably, it stayed put and we were able to get back up the mountain without trouble.
If you ever go to Sicily, it’s got fabulous and very extensive Greek ruins that are as good or better than the ones in Athens. (Not the Parthenon though!)
Fiats Co.
Gringo, “hell is where the traffic patterns are Bostonian. ? No argument from me, though I would add hell is drivers inside Route 128.”
As Foghorn Leghorn used to say, “Ah, ah, resemble that remark”. It gives you great training and nerves of steel. Roma, no problema. The only place I’ve been where I couldn’t hack the driving was Cairo, Egypt with the donkey carts weaving in and out of traffic plus the car horns that seemed to go on automatically when you turned the ignition. The noise from what seemed like a million cars was unbearable.
Fiat are bad, but they’re not by far the worst.
For that, look no further than Lada and Kia.
Citroen and Peugeot are also pretty bad, but nowhere near as bad as those two.
I owned a Fiat Strada for about a year. It was given to me because it needed some repairs. It had a dinky 4 cylinder engine and an automatic transmission made by VW. I live in the Washington DC area and getting on the beltway in that car was always an adventure in driving. They just did not make the entrance ramps and merge lanes long enough for that car to get up to speed. I understand why they had those 60 stickers in the back windows. We joked that Fiats came with factory original rust. They were not very high quality.
I’ve been to Italy a few times since my driving adventure but avoided driving again. A couple of times I had a driver. My favorite place, Venice, driving is not an issue.
Yes to Fix It Again Tony — altho there are far more FIATs here now then there used to be (in Slovakia). Low cost “new”, and many folk like new.
“East Germany’s Trabant, I understand, was pretty horrible”
Actually, it was more like an underpowered VW bug — and often was available, so in practice was among the most common. Not horrible for repairs, just small and wimpy, and very common.
Oldflyer, yep, I’m an A.M Smith fan, too.
Gringo, yes, I had that old chestnut in mind. Would that old joke be called racist today? Unfortunately, it might be. In days of yore it spoke to the cultural differences between various countries with a sense of humor. Today, it might get one banned from the social media biggies. Sigh. 🙁
you think your fiat was bad?
Try soviet russian bad copies of such!!!!
ZAZ-965 (powered by a 756 cc engine with a whopping 23 hp)
its has suicide doors for the disabled!!!
ZAZ-965 was similar to a Fiat 600 visually, but the Fiat served only as an inspiration to developers, and it was actually a completely different car.
The ZAZ-968 was the third generation of the Zaporozhets and while the 911s of that period had engines with a power output of over 150 hp and the first-gen Corvair had 80 hp
The VAZ-2107 is one of three cars that share the same platform derived from the Fiat 124 (the other two are the 2105 and the 2104), and it’s the deluxe version Mechanically, the VAZ-2107 is pretty similar to the VAZ-2101, which was the original car developed from the Fiat 124. The car was very popular in Russia and still is.
he VAZ-2108 started in 1984 and continued until 2013. The car was known abroad as “Lada Samara.” The VAZ-2108 was the first car made by AvtoVAZ that wasn’t based on a Fiat 124 Porsche helped develop the VAZ-2108’s engine head. The VAZ-2108 was sold across the world under the Lada Samara brand, even in Australia.
The FSO Polonez was a Polish car manufactured between 1978 to 2002. The car represented a re-bodied Polski Fiat 125p that was manufactured between 1967 and 1991 and represented a simplified version of the Fiat 125
while the car was designed by a great man, the quality and the ride were pretty awful. In fact, Jeremy Clarkson said that the FSO Polonez was the “worst car in the world to actually drive.” He also described it as “a box under which a careless car buyer would discover a ’40s tractor,” highlighting the bad ride quality, the lack of steering, and the loud engine noise.
[starting to see why they hated the americans? blew the curves… not only that, but when we took over japan, they got to learn how to blow the curves too. and so on and so on. those in opposition, just got left out]
and you have to LOVE the Velorex a motorcyle side car without the motorcyle
“Imagine a motorcycle that crashed into the back of a cow.
he pretty much nailed it and no animals were sacrificed since the body is actually made from vinyl. The Velorex was a three-wheeled car made in Czechoslovakia
Remember the Yugo 45?
Like many other communist cars, the Yugo was based on a Fiat, the Fiat 127 It was cheap, and it showed. The interior was pretty awfully made from cheap plastic. The drive was pretty bad, too. In addition to having a 55 hp 1.1-liter engine, the Yugo also had very wobbly steering and a rough ride. Surprisingly, the car also found its way to the United States, where it was the cheapest car.
and the number one worst care everyone knows once they hear the name
get some starka and time to start the TRABANT
🙂
Making a good car is hard. There is a calculus of costs for development, production and specifications. It is rare that there are not compromises. Product designers and engineers have been poised to unveil some great cars only to be told by the bean counters to cut corners. Sometimes the interior doesn’t live up to the rest of the car. Sometimes the performance or fuel economy is wanting in an otherwise attractive car.
I think Fiat is working the strapped for resources end of the market, sometimes great designs but often cheap seats or an unreliable powertrain. Really successful cars like the Honda Accord get the mix pretty good but often place themselves in the camp of automobile as transportation appliance and neglect refinement or handling. Even money-is-no-object cars make choices that are questionable regarding ride quality or unnecessary but eye catching features. Mazda seems to be doing the best job of making desirable, reliable, fun to drive cars. So naturally they have less than 2% of the US market.
I am a Ford guy, despite the fix or repair daily joke. Always found Fords reliable. Currently driving a 2015 Escape bought 6 months ago. Great car.
In Sweden we have rented Saabs and in France Tweego because my wife likes the name. Never had any issues with either of them. Never rented in Italy, take buses instead. European drivers are a different topic.
Art Deco…my sister’s Vega had like 200,000 miles on it when she & her husband finally gave it to someone else…I think they just gave it away. It rattled every day she drove it…but it ran like a strong horse. My first car was an old Malibu Classic…I beat the life out of it and sold it for what I paid for it when I was done.
I’ve moved away from the US makers of late…But I know plenty of Holden or Ford drivers here in Oz that would laugh in your face if you offered them the keys to anything else.
And hey JTW! Don’t piss on Kia…I’ve got 190,000 kilometres (120,000 miles) on the one I have & it’s still going strong.
Fiat deserves its bad reputation for reliability but the Italians must like them because the company survives. I’ve always liked their styling. It’s understated and rather elegant. The Fiat 500 to my eyes is a masterful design for a sub compact. It failed here like the other Fiats. R.I.P. Sergio Marchionne.
My in-laws are Swiss and you would be banned from the town they live in if you drive up in a Fiat. Last time I visited all the rental company had was an Opel (Ford) and even that got me pitiful looks.
I have had bad experiences with German cars and now my wife and I have Hondas. I previously had a Toyota but don’t like the new design. Both are reliable.
My first car was a 1969 Fiat 850 coupe, purchased (new) for $2200 when I was 16 years old. My mother had to drive it home for me, as I did not yet know how to drive a stick. It had a 50 hp, 50 cubic inch engine and did 0-60 in 18 seconds. It was beautiful and fun to drive, but in constant need of a tuneup. It had “features” you don’t see today, like a manual choke and hand throttle. I am still not sure what the purpose of a hand throttle is.
If you were to consider a Fiat today, I might suggest the reincarnated Fiat 124 convertible. It is basically a Mazda Miata with a gorgeous Italian body grafted onto it. The idea is to get Japanese reliability with Italian looks.
Neo, any car can break down. Granted Fiats don’t have a great reputation but the fact you are 0 for 1 with them doesn’t really prove anything.
Based on limited info., I’d lay most of the blame on the rental car co. As a premium example, Hertz and Ford have (or used to have) a relationship where they cycled lots of new Fords through Hertz, and Hertz/Ford put lots of moderately used cars on the used car market.
I know renters often tend to treat rentals badly. On Maui, with some horrible volcanic based roads, the rental car suspensions can be a wreck.
Fiats are not the best, but Mercedes and BMW are not fabulous either. I’d guess Honda and Toyota are the best, as I have a cheap Honda Fit with 120K on the ODO with zero repairs other than non-dealer maintenance costs.
RIP Sergio Marchionne. Fiat was near death for couple decades at least, and S.M. brought them back, along with Renault, Nissan, and Chrysler. Then he had routine surgery, and proved that no surgery is routine.
They were contracted to manufacture cars in Spain for the closed Spanish market. I drove a dozen Seats and owned two in the 60s, pretty damn good cars, reliable, great mileage. Owned one in the U.S. In the 80s, piece of junk.
Fiat did it right in Iberia, in the New World not so much.
I think this is one of the funniest comment boards that Neo has generated! Fiat is a miracle car just by the fact they are still alive …. My high school buddy had one back in 1958 that we all went to school in bumbling about in the mountains of North Carolina (Asheville)… with the suicide doors.. the 22 horse engine and the constant tuneups … repairs and even as listed above “the hand throttle and choke”.. we had a blast with it tho… and the most amazing thing of all is that in all these years – the latest Fiats look exactly the same! They did get rid of the suicide doors i hear…
most Italian products are suspect…. yes; I’m profiling but it is true. I’ve had a couple Italian washing machines and one was always down waiting on parts… once fixed one or the other would go down again. Ditto at work. Italian automated drills. Lots and lots of problems… the German, Japanese, and American (the American ones were from the 80s…) were all up almost all the time.
Sounds like I had best keep my F-150.
Fiats are not particularly bad. Not the best ones, neither terrible ones, though.
The problem likely lies in the automatic change. It’s quite uncommon in Europe and not very well considered. They’ll have only a few cars just in case, and probably they won’t care that much about then.
A yankee asking for a car with automatic change? Chances are you’ll be handed some piece of junk.
Whoever said Opel is Ford is dead wrong. Opel is a fully owned subsidiary of General Motors.
As to Fiat, the current Fiat 500 isn’t that bad, but that’s mostly because the rolling chassis and engine are designed and built by Ford in their Spanish factories.
Back in the sixties I favored Fiats for my personal use and an American wagon for the family. I started with a used 600 followed by a new 600D and then an 850 coup. Most of that time I lived in So Cal and drove the freeways. The Fiats required A lot of maintenance but they were cheap and really fun to drive.
When I started a garage business I specialized in small and foriegn cars, and soon became the local VW expert. I begrudgingly started driving them myself and actually developed great respect for them. If hopped up a bit they were even fun to drive, although engine life suffered.
I had a 1971 124 Spider and loved that car. Twin air horns, a wooden steering wheel and shift knob, convertible top, awesome styling, and great fun to drive. I suspect it didn’t hurt my interactions with girls, either. I didn’t mind the constant mechanical problems. I did most all the repairs myself since I couldn’t afford an on-call mechanic. (Didn’t need computers to repair and tune cars back then. I used a timing light.) The car taught me many lessons, including self-reliance.
A couple of years back my car was in the shop, and I got a rental for a couple of days. A Fiat 500. After fifteen minutes in it, I concluded that calling it “a glorified golf cart” would be a dreadful insult to honest golf carts.
It is not, however, the most pathetic car I’ve ever driven. That (dis)honor goes to the Pontiac Sunfire I got as a rental on a trip to Grand Canyon a few years back. The base four-hamster engine, using the A/C was a necessity, and I was 7000 feet up on the Colorado Plateau. The lack of power is not easy to describe.
But the worst car ever? I think that title has to go to the Yugo mentioned uptopic. It had a _three_ cylinder engine…
Nothing wrong with 3 cylinder engines. My current car (a VW) has one and it purrs very nicely.
Can do 150kmh if needed, though I rarely need that here (think I’ve done it once when overtaking).
Reliable as hell, good fuel economy, and pulls fast enough. No race car obviously, but gets the job done of getting me to and from work over the highway every day in safety.
A the other end of the scale.. .
the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ, its engine is tuned to produce as much as 770 horsepower. It can go from zero to 60 miles an hour in easily under three seconds
“Nothing wrong with 3 cylinder engines.”
Very true. I owned a SAAB with the three cylinder two stroke engine. It was a very safe and reliable car and I drove it from coast to coast. In college I owned a DKW Junior with a three cylinder two stroke engine. When it was totaled by a red light runner I bought the SAAB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DKW
ok… with my handy little calculator, i just figgerd out that from ’58 to 2018 is 60 years… without a styling change! So they win the prize for longest use of original blueprints (tho’ they did get the doors turned around)… and i stand with this comment thread as the funniest i have followed with Neo. We even got from Fiat to Lamborghini…
Ray:
I too owned a Saab 96 with 3 cylinder two stroke engine. Bought it for $25 in 1973 and drove it to Salt Lake from northern Va a couple of times before it died in Imlay NV on the way to Eureka CA. It was a fun car and great in the snow, but boy did it smoke!
Probably I’m the only one, but I had a 1981 Fiat X1/9 which to this day is the most reliable automobile I’ve ever owned. It was good looking, handled like a dream, stopped on a dime, a wonderful little car… admittedly, the headlights would go down but not up so I had to leave them up all the time, the carb needed more or less constant adjustment, and the alternator it came with was insufficient. But it never, not one time, stranded me or failed to start. I like my Nissan truck, the Sentra was OK but not durable, the Camry is tolerable, the Golf was good but ate brakes… the ’65 Mustang is a classic and fun to drive… but every one of them stranded me at one time or another. The X1/9 never did and if it hadn’t been totaled from behind while sitting at a stop light, I’d probably still be driving it today.
So… apparently, at least once, Fiat transcended their reputation.
I had a Fiat 850 Spyder aftet High School.
Just after warranty, the head gaskey went. Did the work myself.
As a nerd, it did the trick of getting me the attention of girls.
When I worked in Italy in the 70s, I drove a 134. I swore I’d buy one when I got back to the states.
But it was amazing to often see families of 6 or more packed into a CincoCento on a mountain road.
When I was in Germany, the taxis were all Mercedes and I asked a cab driver why a cab was such an expensive vehicle. He told me that the reliability made driving anything else an economically foolish choice.
…is Fiat worse…
Ask taxi drivers in Tehran the answer is unanimous YEEEESSSSS.
They are bought and put to service in disaster of a traffic that is streets of Tehran and break down quite easily. Fiat has unique reputation among all cabs according to the drivers there who have devoted poems in her honor:
Fiat is heart breaker
Fiat’s hard luck maker
Fiat’s gaazo, goozo, dandae
i.e. Fiat’s acceleration, fart (sic), and gear shift
He told me that the reliability made driving anything else an economically foolish choice.
When and where?
Could have introduced you ca. 1967 to a wealthy family devoted to the brand. They quit driving them about a decade later because (1) they couldn’t afford them anymore and (2) they really were lemons. No clue why they ever drove them, but the wife of the pair could be vociferous about her problems with car repair joints. Fr. Andrew Greeley had a story about buying one in Germany in 1965 while on some sort of business trip for the Archdiocese of Chicago. (Greeley’s primary employer at that point was the National Opinion Research Center). He said it cost $3,000, a fraction of what you’d pay in the states. As you can guess, people around Greeley thought it unseemly for a Catholic priest to be tootling around Chicago in a luxury coupe. He got rid of the car after a few years because, “It turned out to be a lemon”.
I suspect that if they were better known, the Lada would wind up at the bottom of the pile. I encountered them in the Republic of Georgia in 1989. They were made in the Eastern Bloc somewhere in factories and (used!) tooling made for an out of date Fiat model. All the wrong factors in their heritage! They certainly had a bad rap in Georgia, but I only had one experience in one, as a hitchhiking passenger. We were going up a long but not steep incline and the motor overheated. On the bright side, I was finally able to start a conversation with the driver. After picking me up (I had written down my destination on a piece of paper, to avoid language problems) we found that he knew no English, and I knew no Georgian or Russian. When the car overheated, he muttered “Verdammt!” And we found that we knew enough German to have a chat. Thank you Lada!