The Fiat 600 Sport Is Cosplaying As A Hot Hatch

Like the idea of a sporty version of the Fiat 600, but don’t fancy the (rather good) electric-only Abarth version? Well, despite its name, the new 600 Sport doesn’t really deliver on that, but it at least does add a bit of attitude to the otherwise coochie-coo retro looks of the regular one.

A new trim level for the regular 600 range, it brings sporty-looking accoutrements including dark-finish 18-inch alloys, a two-tone paint job with a black roof, a smattering of other black accents, and the option of eye-popping Acid Green paintwork, borrowed from the Abarth. Inside, meanwhile, you’re treated to an all-black cabin – lightyears away from some of the jolly pastel hues you can get in other versions – with the seat inserts trimmed in a suede-ish material.

To Fiat’s credit, you do also get a tiny bit of extra performance to make sure those ‘Sport’ badges aren’t totally decorative. Like the normal car, it comes with two flavours of 1.2-litre mild hybrid powertrain, but while in other versions they produce 99bhp and 134bhp, in the Sport, they’ve been upped to 109bhp and 143bhp. Nothing revolutionary, then, but at least it can claim to be slightly sportier than its stablemates. As with the rest of the 600 range, you can get it as a fully-electric 600e Sport too, although this gets an unchanged 152bhp motor.

There’s also no mention of any changes to the chassis (however will it cope with all that extra power?), so this really does seem like a visual upgrade, a tiny bump in power and not a whole lot else. 

It’s nevertheless unsurprisingly the joint-most expensive version of the 600 range in hybrid form, though, with the 109bhp car starting at £28,750 and the more powerful hybrid coming in at £29,750. Oddly, though, the 600e Sport also starts at £29,750 – a couple of hundred quid less than the current base-model 600e Red.

If this is the slightly-sportier-but-not-as-sporty-as-the-actual-sporty-one version of the 600 you’ve been waiting for, then you’ll have to wait just a little bit longer: UK orders open in January, with the first deliveries arriving in April.