History of FIAT Documentary

during the war it uses a tractor it had a character that appeal to people it's got an awful lot of power makes a disproportionate allowed amount of noise get on the motorway on a day like this don't even be known to do 50 you don't so much park it I think you abandon it I've driven everywhere in this it just is a fantastic car Fiat began in the summer of 1899 when in in the form of a meeting between three army officers Giovanni Agnel II can't Roberto biscarrat leader of fear and Count de carrasco and they were interested in things mechanical but there were not engineers so sensibly they didn't attempt to design and build a car themselves they took over the chair on Oh company that made bicycles and a small three and a half horsepower light car which they modified they changed it from belt drive to chain drive and this became the first ever Fiat Fiat is an acronym it was originally decided to call the company the Italian automobile factory fabrica italiana automobile e or fear this had a rather unconvincing sound to it so they decided to add the word Turin AZ to it for Turin which made Fiat the problem with this is that the Vatican took offense because a Fiat wasn't is a papal decree and they thought this was less a majesty in fact in the end a Fiat it became and theaters remained to this day they started almost from the very beginning to produce a very wide range there was no reason why any Italian buyer couldn't find a Fiat to suit them the other thing about Fiat is that apart from the home market which was obviously all important to them they went for export from a very early stage two years after starting in the first Fiats were sold for export Fiat were clearly doing very well in the years up to the first world war and in fact they went on doing well right through them their cars were ideal army staff cars and their trucks were ideal for army vehicles by the end of the first world war Fiat was still doing well but in common with everyone else in the car industry they faced a totally different market the market had expanded beyond anything that had been predicted before the war so what was needed was mass production and Fiat were quick off the mark by 1919 they had a completely new car design the tipo 501 which is a very modern design four-cylinder engine detachable cylinder head full electrics and possibly the first self starter of a food production car sir Fiat 501 for the special body made by Mitchell nothing for a chap who used to live at Savile near not alone it's a lot larger than the normal body because what I can find out he was about six feet tall in fact when I Drive at any distance I have a rolled up blanket behind me because it's rather difficult leaning forward to try and hit the clutch or they break particularly during the war that uses a tractor God knows how many miles it must have done and then when the radiator finally burst they discarded it fix it up with a large galvanized iron tank and they used it to drive a saw by tying one back wheel to the chassis wood rope Jack the other back wheel up took the wing off and the tire and drove a saw I suppose they'd use top gear for twigs and bottom gear for logs would see and then finally it lit lead is starting handle gave up the ghost worn out and so they stopped using it and shoved it in the yellow chicken run you say the farmer was only too pleased to get rid of it you didn't pay for things that you would look to pump so I say as a scavenger and there were only two P to unload the stuff and to use oh well I then keep and all the pouch in fact we used to spend our weekends all over the country various scrap yards in 1961 I was invited over to the Nottingham Luce fair to lead a parade of vintage cars and of course is a photograph appeared eventually in the Washington Post well about a month later or a phone call from a lady who said you don't know me but I know your car does it really matter she'd yes yes I spent my honeymoon in it it's my husband's first car but that was he was the second owner of it and so I took it over to see how you see when the first things he saw it said to me now young man those wheels should not be yellow they were red when we had it so of course you see the wheels on our red [Music] oh well it's very pretty you've got an elbow rest on the upholstery and you put you our there you just drop your handling hipster and you get to drive along you can set the chopper and you'll just go along there steering away it was known as the new high speed Fiat engine does it some runner at 2500 grams which was got a lot in those days it's one and a half liters side valve of course it's got an automatic choke believe it or not an electric automatic choke now they're not very many cards have had those they cruises at 45 get on the motorway on a day like this study would be known to do 50 I never imagined that when I found this wreck then it would take me to the various places on the continent have you tested and you know what English people are like driving abroad they won't take the car to them and help it think that I Drive a car of f aged over to Italy and I almost destined like this by the right altar color and time I've known it as Y on t own it's a fact they're the our old togged up in their lightweight suits and out neck shirts but I don't just wear it sighs you've got to keep up the image you know now after all we're English the five-o one's success was so marked that its rivals began to copy it and it's an open secret that Herbert Austin's Austin 12 was a crib of the tipo 501 the early post-war cars that Fiat made carried them through into the years of the depression that proved the demise of so many well-established and apparently thriving car companies in Fiats case it's hardly seemed to cause a ruffle in company's prosperity because by then they were making so many other things as well railway locomotives row we're rolling stock fighter aircraft and ships and this was a time remember when Mussolini's regime in Italy was pursuing a very very energetic and lucrative rearmament program which feared it was doing very well is that they moved down market to the small car market which was opening up as people were less wealthy less able to afford the existing cars and the car which most people will remember an associate with fairness I think the measure of a popular car is when it gets a name this particular car is known as the top early though little mouse or Mickey Mouse in in Italy the Volkswagen Beetle is known as the beetle Volkswagen didn't give me that name no individual gave that night and in Srilanka the little Fiat 500 the little topper lino is known as the bug fear and I have actually seen unpainted red with black spots which would really look the part it's 569 CCS and it develops an enormous 13 brake horsepower sound of the old RAC rating was 6.7 horsepower which meant that when he came to tax the car when I was a young man it was only 12 pounds is that a 15 so they've had a great benefit the top laner was designed in response to a competition held at the Fiat works in turin and they wanted to bring out a small family car that could be afforded by even the peasants at that time it came down to an aero engine designer Dan GGO cosa who actually came up with the design for this little car he decided against having a front-wheel drive two cylinder air cord engine and he went for a standard four cylinder engine water-cooled side valve prop shaft to the back axle in other words a big car in miniature but one that had to be made to a price this particular one in 1938 sold for 120 pounds on the road but if you wanted a rear wheel cover or bumpers they were 30 shillings action as soon as I started to drive it I feel completely in love with it it's so small it's very economical and very willing unlike most cars of that period this particular one as you can see has a bit of shape about it it's a bit of streamlining about it whereas the Morris 8c Austin sevens of the pier were very box-like structures this one is something different the bonnet slopes down so you get a beautiful view of the road from it no bonnet away and it cruises along very happily at four to four to five miles an hour and it does 50 miles to the gallon so for a young man with young family it was the ideal girl and this particular model this one I bought in 1980 in boxes took me three years to restore it and first showed it Bromley pageant a motoring in 1983 June and I've driven everywhere in this it just is a fantastic car [Music] the topple Ino carried on in production in it's basically pre-war form up to 1948 even then what happened was not the dropping of the model but its replacement by a restyled version called the Fiat 500c this stayed in production until 1957 and then they changed their philosophy completely and went back to rear-engine cars the Fiat 500 that was introduced in 1957 went on from strength to strength as the Fiat 500 that most people remember in their sixties and seventies Sugiyama to potential Mamaki none will be seen on appeal to people because it was chic because it was Italian and because once again although it was very small very compact and very economical it was a real car it could be driven enthusiastically it could be driven quickly within the limits of its performance and people loved it it had a character at appeal to people which is very difficult to sum up but it's quite unmistakable the success of a Fiat 500 meant that Fitz next step was to produce a larger engine version where called a Fiat 600 and it was worked upon by specialists like Carlo a bath to produce a very very potent rally car [Music] this is basically a fit 600d from 1966 which was transformed into a fare Darbar thousand Berliner Corsa which means when racing saloon [Music] it's a digital car it's got an awful lot of power makes it disproportionate and now noise but it has lots of sophistication which is not immediately apparent so I know it's got a five-speed gearbox and a limited slip diff and it's got double wishbone front suspension so called pendel re front suspension and italian lots of things that you you are not immediately obvious so the character is in the first place hidden but it's extremely quick it's a real full-blooded Italian racing car in sheep's clothing I saw an advert one day for a Lotus engine Fiat 600 which I thought was a wonderful idea so I rang the bank and said I want to buy this small car and and they said what sort of small cars to fit 600 he said very sensible and he lent me the money there because I did leave out the detail that had a 1600 engine and hanging out of the back and it was purely for sprinting and hill climbing and subsequently circuit racing carlo Abarth was a man who wanted to go motor racing and he hit upon the idea of taking a very mundane car either Fiat 600 which was produced to basically move the masses and transform it to whatever degree the customer wanted he really did expect very very good performance from what was at the end of the day we were bound an air [Music] the rear end which you will see is propped up started in the early sixties so with a view to getting rid of some heat and it was propped up a few inches and they discovered by chance the car actually went a bit faster this is an aerodynamic issue so by 64 the the thing was horizontal and is apparently worth six or seven kilometers an hour in top speed is actually with this type of engine can't be closed anyhow our baths were terribly expensive I remember in the process I can tell you that in 1963 a twin-cam 1 litre was three thousand 999 quid and each I was two thousand a full-blown racing version this by the end of the decade was was over ten thousand pounds which was huge amounts of money [Music] [Music] you might expect Fiat five and 600 material to be full of children dogs the paraphernalia of family life in fact that's not the case the people in these are very chic well-dressed adults ladies in cocktail dresses peer through the roofs of Fiat 500s for adults dressed in suits pile into a car that is obvious ridiculously small [Music] the Fiat 600 was produced at 633 ccs with water-cooled engine and created a platform for other vehicles like the fiat 600 multiplier which is the taxi version we call them MP V's today and all sorts of manufacturers would tell you how wonderful they've invented this new idea well it's it's rubbish because Fiat produced it back in the late 50s on the fit 600 chassis and you can move seven people about it's called a fit 600 multiplier what's the first MPV they should make more of it they invented it [Music] Fiat had found that the there were more and more lucrative pickings to be made at the smaller end of the car market but they did have one or two flirtations with a larger end which probably reached their Zenith in the 60s with a Fiat 2300 this was a large boxy saloon but it provided the basis for one of the most elegant and desirable feats of the entire company's history this was the Fiat 2300 s what you're looking at here was bodied by mr. Gere and Carlo are buff waved his magic wand over the engine I like to think that what you're looking at now is probably the best example in the UK back in the late sixties the early seventies I was I was working in the Lebanon my daughter was born out there and my daughter's Godfather actually owned this car ever since he bought it and I wrote in it on one tonight bill decided he wanted to buy what was then the new Alfa Romeo mm JTB I said fine but he knew this one he said sell it I said how much do you want for a simple I'll take a thousand was it done when the 2300 kupe first appeared it wasn't long before people started calling it the poor man's Ferrari and I'm sure Fiat can't have been too disappointed with that description because it was a great deal cheaper than a Ferrari it looked beautiful it had plenty of performance and it was rather understated it appealed to people with money not on a Ferrari scale but people who wanted something different [Music] we got back into this country in 77 we used to then until 1979 as a family car basically and then in 1979 I took her off the road and said one of these days I'm gonna get around to rebuilding it three house moves later and going through the list of priorities that married men are obliged to go through it took me until 1991 to actually start the real because the kerosene very very little in English winters it hadn't suffered the traditional faith of Italian cars in the sixties having rusted spaces so one of the first jobs we did was to spend a year on Geneva making sure that everything was solid stripping it down to bare metal underneath and sink everything is a zinc painted if you're gonna do it then you must do it right the original paint put on by gear was acrylic paint that didn't weather very well in the Middle East because of the hot temperatures accompanied with cold car washes and the paint actually craze like crazy paving no matter how many times you painted it that crazy paving came through so the only answer at the end of the day was to stripper right down to bare metal and start again the people I found to do it were absolutely superb real craftsmen the only original part of the color left on the car was on the glove box and they took the glove box off and they matched and mixed the paint to match the gun box and when it came back you couldn't tell the difference between the two they were spot-on superb it's quite funny when you talk about cars when you say aren't restored an old car and they say why is it you say affair and you can see the look on their face this man must be mad if you then show them the car and get the Mille then they understand she's basically built for long distance Autobahn driving she will cruise all day at a hundred mile an hour without any hiccup at all you've even got a hand throttle you can take your feet off the pedals if you wish and just sort of relaxed driving around town is not fun you're trying to tote a ton and a third there are bounced plus passengers if you've got any with no power steering parking it in confined spaces you don't so much Park it I think you abandon it [Music] it was a success but small success it couldn't compete in commercial terms it simply extended the fiat representation into a market that they were assumed to make their own by a much closer involvement with Ferrari themselves in 1967 Fiat produced the Fiat Dino Fiats progressively closer relationship with Ferrari in fact ended in them taking over completely although theater has taken over most of the rest of the Italian car industry it's never indulged in badge engineering it's never absorbed those companies so completely that they lose their identity Lancia is produced under Fiat ownership Alfa Romeo is produced under Fiat ownership still remain recognizably different I think with the Fiat today have a wonderful range of vehicles and I'm not being paid to say this but I feared and then one of the things they identified was a need for a really small car we have far too many cars on our roads they take up too much room they use that too much fuel people are live in big cities don't want big cars there's no apartment so they relaunched the 500 concept in the cinquecento and okay it has a 900 or even larger engine but it is a very small car it has a personality it's a cheeky looking car it's good fun its environmentally friendly it's good value for money inexpensive to buy does exactly what the original 500 and 600 set out to do the one thing the Fiat story lacks is drama there aren't any cliff-hanging moments because Fiat found a successful formula right at the beginning and carried on prospering on that formula ever since there is a saying about Fiat that most people know that the French government owns Renault nobody knows who owns VW but everyone knows that Fiat owns Italy [Music] [Music]

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Id: tQLEyLboaa8

Length: 23min 45sec (1425 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 06 2018