Full Info Arrives On Back-To-Basics, Manual Fiat 500 Hybrid

The old Fiat 500 was absolutely ancient. Not the original one from the 1950s – the reborn one launched in 2007. When it went off sale last year, it had been on the market for 17 years, which is basically prehistoric by car standards.

There has, of course, been a new new Fiat 500 for a few years, which for a while was on sale alongside the old new Fiat 500. Stay with us now. That new new 500 has so far been electric only, but to compensate for the recent slowing down of the EV market, a similar mild hybrid system to the one from the old new 500 is now available in the new new 500. Got it?

Okay, none of this really matters, because the new 500 Hybrid is, in the year 2025, a new A-segment city car with a manual gearbox, and that alone is enough for us to be interested in it.

Said six-speed manual, sprouting from the dash like it should in a small Fiat, is paired up with largely the same 1.0-litre turbocharged three-cylinder and 12V hybrid system that you got in the old 500 and Panda Hybrids.

There is one key difference – where the old 500 Hybrid was naturally aspirated, the new one is turbocharged. So it must be making a heap more power, right? Erm, no. It's actually got 64bhp compared to the old one's 69bhp. We're not entirely sure how this has happened.

That makes for expectedly leisurely numbers, with 0-62mph taking 16.2 seconds in the hatch. The Convertible, with its rollback fabric roof, is somehow over a second slower than that, at 17.3 seconds. Again, we're not sure how that happened, but either way, both variants are slower than their old 500 Hybrid equivalents. Top speed for both is a rip-roaring 96mph.

Still, numbers like that have always been fine for cheeky little city cars, and cheeky the 500 Hybrid most certainly is. It looks basically identical to the 500e on the outside, and save for that funny lever coming out of the dash, the interior’s pretty much the same, too. That includes a 10.25-inch central infotainment screen and a 7-inch rectangular digital instrument display, still slightly awkwardly shoved into a circular cowling.

It entered production this month at at Fiat’s famous but currently rather underutilised Mirafiori factory in Turin. Pricing’s yet to be announced, but we imagine it’ll undercut the £25,035 entry point of a 500e. Better remember how to use a clutch pedal ahead of right-hand drive cars arriving next year.