Aw, Fiat Welcomes a New Baby EV

Say hello to possibly the cutest vehicle to go on sale since the Frog-Eyed Sprite. This satin teal, doorless marshmallow is the new Fiat Topolino, a fully electric quadricycle that will be silently snaking through European city streets very soon.

For those of us who didn't take GCSE Italian, Topolino literally translates as ‘baby mouse’ (just when you thought that this car couldn't be any more adorable). The name Topolino was first used colloquially to refer to the 1936 Fiat 500, the tiny city car that sold over half a million examples and provided Italians from Milan to Palermo with inexpensive four-wheeled transportation. The designers of the new car aim to follow in these  footsteps, or should I say, paw prints.

The Topolino uses the underpinnings of Citroen’s Ami, meaning a scary 8 bhp and 28 mph top speed - more than enough for the 16 year olds who are legally permitted to drive it. France’s popular urban runabout has created a bit of a social media storm with countless videos of Seb Loeb-wannabes skidding through city streets, sending them down staircases and occasionally flipping them over round the Monaco hairpin in rather dramatic style… I’m not sure that the Fiat’s ropes in place of doors would do much to keep an occupant in place if it were to end up skidding down a hill on its side. Let's just hope that Fiat has tried to rectify this instability, it would be a shame for it to… Topolover. Sorry.