Fiat 500E

Bumping this thread to add my own experiences.

We (finally!) took delivery of a 500e soft-top in La Prima trim in July, and after 4000 km, I am very happy with it, despite “downsizing” from a five-door compact hatchback. Here’s a summary.

There’s lots of headroom (I’m over 6 feet tall), seats and driving position are good even for long journeys. It’s a short car, and the 19" wheels on the La Prima model are probably a little too firm for typical Irish town roads with cracks and uneven patching, but it stays well planted on the road. Seats in the back are strictly for those under 5’5” or so, or very short journeys.

On the road, the soft-top is a good bit louder inside than the hard-top, because of the extra wind noise, but on a sunny day, you don’t mind so much. Even at 80 km/h it’s pretty pleasant with the top down (providing it’s actually warm out, and not raining!).

The cabrio model’s official range is 305 km. In the real world, I get about 240 km when driving exclusively on roads with 100km/h and 120 km/h limits. I’ve noticed a big difference between driving at 100 and 120 km/h in terms of consumption though, so I’d imagine the range on motorway would be more like 200 km - it’s a short car, and that means more aerodynamic drag. On the other hand, being small means that when driving around town the battery takes forever to go down - FIAT claim this model has over 400km of range solely on the urban cycle, and I’d actually believe that: this is where the car is really at its most efficient.

AC charging is limited to 11 kW, so you’ll get no benefit from the public AC chargers offering 22 kW rather than 11 (or those rarer 30 kW ones): DC is the way to go for fast charging, and it’ll work at up to 80 kW then, which is plenty for this size of battery. However, I charge at home overnight on a 7kW charger, and (via a 3-pin plug) at work, so I haven’t needed to use a DC charger since I bought the car. A three-hour home charge puts about 50~55% onto the battery, using 21 units of electricity. If you pick a good electricity plan (ours has three hours in the early morning at around 7c/unit), that makes this extraordinarily cheap to run. On a regular 13 Amp mains plug, it’s around 5% per hour of charging.

Like the previous 500 models, driving is “fun”, rather than “performance”, but it’s not slow either. It drives like a regular car in “Normal” mode, with a gradual coast down when you release the accelerator. I’ve tried the one-pedal “range” mode, but I don’t like one-pedal driving in general, so I can’t say much except that it’s better than some others I’ve tried - speed control is smooth and easy with no hopping or lurching. The car is perfect around town, but it’ll also keep up with motorway traffic: I came from a 150 bhp diesel, and this car’s acceleration from 80km/h is impressive by that standard, and overtaking is not a problem: you can get close to 140 km/h very quickly if you’re not watching the accelerator (I haven’t hit the 150km/h speed limiter, but I get the impression that it’s there mainly to save battery, and without it, the car could go a good bit faster).

The in-car entertainment system is simple, responsive and easy to use. I cannot fault it - for sheer usability, it’s the best system I’ve seen in any car I’ve test-driven (that’s most cars and nearly all EVs). The Sat-Nav is good (it’s TomTom), with live traffic, and good display of charge-points along the route. It occasionally can’t find some addresses by Eircode, but as the unit does Apple CarPlay and Android Auto you could always use your preferred navigation app instead. The La Prima models also come with lane-keeping automatic cruise control (the car will steer itself to stay in lane, and keep its distance from the car in front), which really does work, and makes longer journeys a little more relaxing. There are limits, though: it doesn’t like very wide road lanes or roads without good lane markings (as you’d expect).

In the end, you can’t get around the fact that this is a small car, so you won’t be loading it with building materials or moving house using it. On the other hand, this is a small car, so you can park it on-street in the kind of space that other cars just can’t use (well, except for other 500s). The boot is the same size between hard-top and soft-top, but the soft-top has a much smaller hatch opening, which could be a problem. The seats go down if you need extra space, but that’ll get you only the sort of space you’d have in an estate car with the back-seats up.

If you don’t need a big car, or if you have the use of one for those occasional long trips or heavy loads, then this is a great choice.