The Story Of The Lovable Fiat 850 Berlina
Automobile historians like me constantly celebrate the weird and wonderful of the automobile world, the cars that broke new ground in terms of style or technology. The little Fiat 850, however, definitely wasn’t such a thing…
Published in
4 min readMay 23, 2022
It’s fair to say that, had Fiat’s engineering supremo had his way, the Fiat 850 wouldn’t have happened.
The rewards of conformity
Dante Giacosa had been championing front-wheel drive at Fiat for some time already, and the launch of Alec Issigonis’s Mini in 1959 clearly showed it was the way of the future.
However, his enthusiasm wasn’t shared by Fiat’s management. After all, the company was selling all the cars it could make, controlling a massive chunk of an Italian automobile market that was expanding at a breakneck pace and showed no signs of slowing down.
Fiat knew that the vast majority of existing 600 buyers would gladly come back for more of the same, and that’s precisely what the 850 offered: an incremental improvement upon the tried and tested 600 formula.
