By Michael Booth
Specifications
Would suit:
Teenage speed freaks.
Price:
£9995 (about R141 000).
Maximum speed:
185km/h, 0-100km/h in 9.5sec.
Average fuel consumption:
6.6 litres/100km.
A Fiat Panda saved my life. It didn't provide miraculous protection in a terrible crash, or gently nudge a pair of armed robbers into a pond, Herbie-style. Its role in your reading pleasure was more passive than that.
I learned to drive in a Fiat Panda, one of the originals designed in 1980 by Giorgetto Giugiaro to meet the same needs as the 2CV had done 30 years earlier.
My learner Panda - my mother's car - had about the same amount of power as a hand-held vacuum cleaner.
Sometimes it seemed as if the scenery was moving faster than we were and often I suffered the indignity of being out-dragged from the lights by electric wheelchairs but it was all I had so, for more than a year, this tin hut on wheels had to fulfil all my flat-out motoring fantasies.
These alternated between a) it was the final stage in the World championship rally and I, the plucky rookie with the broken arm and Suzi Quatro as his co-driver, had Hannu Mikkola breathing down my exhaust, and b) as Roger Moore, I had commandeered the Panda from a local farmer (left holding my safari jacket, open mouthed in the dust as I accelerated away), and was being chased by a man with three nipples in a rocket-firing helicopter.
This meant that, most of the time, I drove with my right leg braced against the front bulkhead but, thankfully, the Panda rarely troubled the national speed limit, and ran out of puff altogether on steep inclines.
But had my mother owned one of the new 100HP (74kW) Pandas, I would almost certainly now be a long-forgotten makeshift shrine beside the road.
This is Fiat's frisky new version of the Panda, with a cheeky body kit of side skirts, black wheel-arch trims, 15" alloy rims and a fake rear diffuser (a hilarious thing to attach to a Fiat Panda, like fitting a fake nuclear warhead to a Cessna).
It certainly feels a good deal faster - and lots more fun - than the standard car, thanks to a 1.4-litre engine, a sharper throttle, much harder, lower suspension and a noisier exhaust.
Instead of the normal car's Park Assist button to lighten the steering, this one has a Sport button that lessens assistance by 20 per cent to give you a better feel for what the front wheels are up to at speed.
Barrel along
You can barrel along at what, again, feels like quite a rate, enjoying the close-ratios and slick action of the six-speed gear box.
The interior has a leather-trimmed steering wheel and slightly more grippy seats, but there are still some traces of the original in this new Panda; the boxiness is still there, you sit fairly high up, and it has lots of glass.
This is still no death-wish, Renault Clio Sport killer. The best thing of all about the 100HP is that it makes you feel you are flying when, to the rest of the world, it looks like you are simply pottering.
So it's perfect, then, for teenage kicks without the calamities. - The Independent, London