Fiat Has Reinvented The Piaggio Ape As An EV Three-Wheeler

Go to any built-up area in Italy, from the bustling streets of Milan to a remote Sicilian village, and there’s a good chance you might spot a Piaggio Ape. Still produced today, these tiny three-wheeled vans and pickups have long been the backbone of urban delivery in Italy and other places with narrow streets that would flummox a regular van.

We can’t help but feel that the Ape, itself still in production today, has served as a big part of the inspiration for this, the Fiat Tris. It’s a new all-electric three-wheeler, aimed specifically at businesses in the Middle East and Africa but designed and developed at Fiat’s Centro Stile in Italy.

It’s naturally not a powerhouse. Its motor is a 48v unit, the same sort of thing that might provide the token electric element in a full-size ‘mild-hybrid’ car, and produces a mighty 12bhp and 33lb ft of torque. Top speed? 28mph. Buckle up.

The battery has a 6.9kWh capacity, good for a quoted 56 miles of range, which should realistically be plenty for the largely urban trips it’ll be making. It’s the same unit featured in the Citroen Ami and Fiat Topolino twins. Charging is handled by an integrated 220v plug, and it can be juiced up from empty to 80 per cent in three and a half hours.

Payload is 540kg, and while we don’t have a weight figure for the Tris, the four-wheeled Topolino weighs in at 487kg, so this three-wheeler probably has a decent chance of hauling itself. That said, you’d probably need to extensively modify the back to make that possible, which you could do by speccing either the flatbed or chassis cab configurations. A ready-made pickup version is available too.

Set to be built in Morocco alongside the Ami and Topolino, it sounds like the Tris will initially only be available in Middle Eastern and African markets. Seems like it makes perfect sense for the many ancient and big car-unfriendly cities scattered across Europe as well, though, so we wouldn’t rule out seeing one of these next time you pop over to Barcelona or Bratislava. We can’t see a market for it in, say, South Dakota, though.