Fiat 500, 2007: a relaunch that rhymed with 1957

On 4 July 1957 Fiat presented the Nuova 500 in Turin, a tiny rear-engined car designed under Dante Giacosa that put postwar Italy on four wheels. Exactly fifty years later, on 4 July 2007, again in Turin, Fiat presented its successor. The new 500 came from the Trepiùno concept shown in 2004, designed by Roberto Giolito at Centro Stile Fiat, and kept the original’s round face, short overhangs and cheerful proportions on a modern front-wheel-drive base shared with the Panda. It was built in Tychy, Poland, and won European Car of the Year for 2008.

The 500 then became a family. An open-top 500C and Abarth versions followed, then the larger 500L in 2012 and the 500X crossover in 2014. In 2020 Fiat began building a fully electric third-generation 500 at its Mirafiori plant in Turin. Demand for that car was weaker than hoped: in 2024 Stellantis paused its production several times, citing slow sales of electric cars in Europe, and later added a hybrid 500 built on the same base at the same plant.

Fifty years to the day

In our books, rhyming reads a company’s launches as notes on a staff, and asks whether each new move echoes an earlier one. A rhyme carries the shape of an earlier move into a new register, with new materials and a new tempo. The 2007 car was a rhyme in that sense. Mechanically it had nothing in common with the 1957 original. What it took was the movement: a small, affordable, cheerful car that made the city easier, released at a time when small cars were back in favour in European cities.

The date was part of the rhyme. Choosing the fiftieth anniversary, the same city and the same name told buyers how to read the car before they sat in it. The new 500 arrived carrying fifty years of affection for the old one, an asset that had sat largely idle since the original went out of production in 1975. That inheritance gave a new model a past, something advertising alone struggles to do.

The name as a family

Once a name carries meaning, every product that wears it inherits that meaning by default. The books call this value inheritance: a sub-brand takes on its parent’s values wherever it asserts nothing of its own, and the one illegal move is to assert a value that contradicts the parent.

The 500C and the Abarth fit comfortably: one adds open air, the other adds performance, and neither contradicts small and cheerful. The 500L and 500X are a harder case. They borrowed the face and the name for cars that were larger, heavier and aimed at families who needed space, which sits close to the opposite of what the 500 had always meant. In our reading they traded on the inheritance more than they added to it, and the brand’s identity became harder to state in one sentence. A family name is a store of value, and each new member either adds to it or draws it down.

When the market’s tempo changes

Rhyming has two halves. Internal rhyme asks whether a move echoes your own history. External rhyme asks whether it lands in time with the market. The 2007 car hit both. The electric 500 of 2020 rhymed internally, since an electric city car is a natural extension of a car built for cities, but it arrived at a price and a moment when many European buyers were not ready to follow. Adding a hybrid at Mirafiori is a correction of tempo: the same shape, at a price and with a technology closer to where buyers actually are.

The useful question for any company with a famous product in its past is what that product’s movement was, separate from its specifications. Fiat answered it well in 2007, and the answer is still being tested. If you want to read your own portfolio as a score and choose the next note so it rhymes, see what we do and how we work through it with you.