Why you should love the Fiat Multipla
The best minivan ever designed deserves much, much better than being the butt of too many bad jokes…
Seems like a million years ago now, but there was a time when minivans were the hottest market segment, with every automaker worth its salt competing for a piece of the pie.
Fiat’s entry into this category, the 1998 Multipla, can be considered the best minivan ever designed.
one of the few cars to have been holistically designed around its intended function
Fiat’s solution was brilliant: six seats of identical size in a three-abreast configuration. Sounds simple enough, but that meant ripping the car design rulebook to shreds. That’s because we’re all used to see cars with a fuselage-like cross-section: wider at the base on the windows and gently tapering upwards.
Seating comfortably three people across instead of the usual two made that impossible, given the vehicle could only be widened so much before it became impractical. That’s why the Multipla’s sides went up straight as a wall. One mostly made of glass, letting light into a spacious cabin whose dashboard, for once, didn’t look like the butt of an elephant thanks to its brightly colored textile covering.
