Fiat 500 (1915)

The Fiat 500 of 1915 was a small two-seat open touring car that Fiat built as a single prototype and never put into production. It came three years after the Zero of 1912, the company's first series-built model, whose price of 8,000 lire put it out of reach of lower and middle income buyers. Fiat's management wanted a car for the masses, in the way Ford was doing with the Model T, and at the Corso Dante works the engineers designed a small torpedo with a four-cylinder engine of about 500 cubic centimetres, which probably gave the car its name. The engine produced 10 horsepower and gave a top speed of 65 kilometres an hour. The First World War stopped the little car, and when it was shown again in 1919 it passed unnoticed, partly because cheap motorised cycles were then a popular alternative to a real car, which in Italy was still seen as a luxury. The project was abandoned, and the name and the idea came back in the early 1930s with the Fiat 500 Topolino.