Fiat 500 Hybrid Review 2025 | Fiat's electric city car has been turned into a hybrid (sort of)

What is the Fiat 500 Hybrid?

Often, a car maker will create an EV by adapting a car conceived with a petrol engine to take batteries. But the Fiat 500 Hybrid is the exception to the rule. With this car, Fiat’s done it the other way around: gently easing a petrol engine and running gear into a car that was designed to be an EV.

Why? Well, put simply, the electric 500 was supposed to take over from the old petrol-powered one completely. But EVs haven’t taken off as rapidly as Fiat had expected. And with the old 500 Hybrid - which was still on sale alongside the new electric model - ageing rapidly, it needed a replacement, something that would appeal to the style-conscious buyers that had flocked to the old model.

Rather than come up with an all-new car, the company figured it would be cheaper to reverse-engineer the electric 500 to accept the petrol engine (Fiat calls it a hybrid, but it has only the mildest of electrical assistance, so it’s really just a petrol engine) from the old car. And this, the new 500 Hybrid, is the result. It goes up against city cars like the Kia Picanto and Hyundai i10, though unlike those cars, it very much makes its singular sense of style – rather than pragmatism – its USP.

How practical is it?

No two ways about it: the 500 Hybrid simply isn’t a practical car. In fact, you’ll struggle to find a new car on sale today that has a smaller boot. With just 183 litres of space on offer in the back, you’ll be able to fit in a couple of bags of shopping, and that’s about it.

Even when you fold the rear seats down, the space available won’t go beyond 440 litres: that’s about as much as you’ll get in a regular family hatchback. In other words, if luggage capacity is important to you, look elsewhere.

The same is true if you regularly want to carry passengers in the rear seats. There’s just about enough room for an adult to sit behind another with the front seat moved forward, but neither party will be enormously comfortable.

And while you can fit a pair of child seats in, expect the poor kids’ legs to be jammed up against the front seat backs: just the thing if you enjoy irregular back massages from kicking feet. Access through the narrow gap left behind the front seats when they’re tipped forward is a pain, too; there’s no five-door version of the 500 to make life easier.

Up front, the news is better, although not by much. Neither of the front seat occupants will feel cramped, but neither will they feel overly endowed with space. What’s more, the left-hand drive examples we test drove suffered from a rather awkward pedal layout, a corollary of Fiat having had to cram a clutch into the pedal box. We’ll have to wait and see whether this carries over when the steering wheel’s on the other side.

The rest of the driving position is an acquired taste, too; the seat is mounted high up, which means taller drivers and those who sit more upright may find their view blocked by the low roofline and chunky rear-view mirror.

The one saving grace is that there’s a decent amount of stowage space for odds and ends in the front, with the dedicated cubby for a smartphone just below the main screen a particular highlight.

What’s it like to drive?

The overriding sense you get when you drive the 500 is one of cheeriness. This is a happy car, one that’s in its element whizzing around on city streets, and it puts a smile on your face in a way most city cars simply can’t.

That’s not to say that it’s fast. Quite the opposite, in fact. The only engine on offer is a tiny little 1.0-litre three-cylinder, and while you do get mild-hybrid assistance, it’s very weak, and only really works as a slightly enhanced stop-start system.

As a result, 64bhp is all you get, and given that the 500 is pretty hefty for such a dinky car (it’s about 200kg heavier than a Kia Picanto), that means an almost laughable 0-62mph time of 16.2 seconds.

And yet, at urban speeds, the engine’s so eager low down that the 500 feels nippier than its figures suggest. Meanwhile, the short gear ratios and the silky-smooth gearshift action mean it’s never a chore to have to row through the gears, at which point the 500 revels in showing you what it can do, like a puppy that wants to show off its – admittedly rather limited – trick repertoire.

In town, then, there’s enough get-up-and-go to keep up with traffic. But there’s only so much that clever gearing and a willing nature can do.

Out of town, on faster roads, it isn’t long before you notice the lack of grunt. Put your foot down in top gear at 60mph and… well, not a lot happens. At 70mph, there’s very little left to give, and you’ll need an awful lot of straight, flat road to get anywhere near the 500’s stated top speed of 96mph.

It’s definitely not a car suited to the cut-and-thrust of the fast lane, then. Mind you, if you’re content to bimble along at 65mph, enjoying the pliant ride and the sense of stability that comes from that extra weight, it’s perfectly fine.

Indeed, that ride comfort is one of the 500’s great strengths around town. Most small cars struggle in this area, but the 500 rides in a pretty sophisticated way; it isn’t even flustered by heavily rutted or cobbled streets. Yes, the suspension can be a little noisy from time to time, but crucially, you don’t feel too much of the bumps.

It’s fun to drive, too. Again, you’ll be disappointed if you like a hard-edged, dynamic driving experience, although to be fair, if that’s what you’re looking for here, you’re probably looking in the wrong place. But, while the steering is a bit light and doesn’t give you much in the way of feedback, it’s also progressive and direct, and that makes it easy to pick your line, lean on the 500’s generous reserves of grip, and wring what little power you can out of the buzzy little three-pot engine as you go. It feels properly Italian to drive: more like the original 500 than the model it replaces, in fact.

Technology, equipment & infotainment

While European markets get three versions of the 500, only two will be offered in the UK; we’ll miss out on the entry-level Pop model.

So the range here will start with the Icon version, which gets a fairly decent specification for such a small car: climate control, wireless smartphone mirroring, rear parking sensors, LED headlights, and a 10.25-inch touchscreen all come as standard.

It’s the top-spec La Prima model that feels the most luxurious, though: it adds faux leather seats, heated in the front, satellite navigation, and a reversing camera.

Whichever model you choose, you get a smart-looking and easy-to-understand cockpit. Particularly good is the swathe of coloured plastic that spans the dashboard: body-coloured in the Icon, or a sort of champagne gold in the La Prima, with the latter also getting a smart two-tone steering wheel that looks particularly upmarket.

The touchscreen is fairly quick and well laid-out, too, so finding your way around it is a doddle. And below, you get a useful line of physical piano key switches, which you can use to quickly adjust the climate control, and without having to resort to delving into menus on the screen, such as you do in some other small cars.

In front of the driver, meanwhile, sits a huge pod that houses a digital readout of the speedo and other driving information. This looks a little crowded, but in practice, it’s fairly easy to read the information you need at a glance.

Fiat 500 Hybrid running costs

In every walk of life, you tend to have to pay a premium to choose a more stylish option, and here, it’s no different.

You’ll have to pay just shy of £20,000 to get yourself into a 500 Icon (and around £2,000 more than that for the La Prima), which is quite a lot of money for what it is. To put that in context, a Kia Picanto in equivalent specification will set you back around £2,500 less. Renault will even sell you a Clio, with more toys, two extra doors and a lot more space, for just £500 more.

And it’s not as if the 500 makes up for its high price with low running costs, either. The 500 should do around 40-45mpg in the real world, which doesn’t sound too bad. Until you realise, that is, that the Clio (which, don’t forget, is a bigger car with around 30 per cent more power) will actually do slightly better. As if to hammer the point home, a Kia Picanto will best both of them.

Servicing on the 500 should be carried out every 9,000 miles or one year, whichever comes up first. That’s a touch more frequent than most other manufacturers, who place the limit at 10,000 miles. Having said that, most 500 buyers won’t cover high mileages; that being the case, they’ll need to get their cars serviced annually, which is on a par with other cars in this class.

Fiat 500 Hybrid reliability

How reliable will the 500 Hybrid be? Well, we can’t say for sure, as it’s still too new for us to have gathered sufficient data. But we can draw on several clues that are available to us to get a rough idea.

Firstly, Fiat’s reliability record as a whole. Not good news there, unfortunately. The car maker came 28th out of the 30 to be included in the latest What Car? Reliability Survey, which is a pretty dismal result.

We can also look at the scores of the 500e, the car on which the 500 Hybrid is based. Again, the tale is one of woe; it came 21st out of the 26 small cars to feature in the What Car? Survey.

The only glimmer of hope, comes from the fact that the previous-generation Fiat 500 – the one that used the same 1.0-litre engine that Fiat’s shoe-horned into the latest 500 – fared much better. It came 7th in the small car sector of the survey, with a very respectable score of 97.9 per cent.

Where does that leave the 500 Hybrid? Well, not in a great position, to be frank, but it should be slightly less of a liability than the electric version of the same car.