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… — 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.