Fail of the century #7: Fiat 500l MPW

Rebooting an icon. A delicate balancing act, and one easy to get horribly wrong. For every new Mini there’s a new Beetle. For every Ford GT there’s a Ford Thunderbird.

In other words, for every sensitive, redolent homage, there is the sort of tin-eared tribute act you’d find playing in a flat-roofed pub at 10.30pm on a Thursday night.

For example, 2007’s Fiat 500 ranks as a rare hit, a reboot that truly recaptured the spirit and charm of the original. More than can be said for Fiat’s subsequent attempts to stretch the nuova 500 in new and undesired directions.

The 500L – a Panda-based mini-MPV thing evoking the original 500 much as Caesar’s Palace in Vegas evokes Rome’s Pantheon – was bad enough. But it was the 500L MPW that really took the biscotti.

On the plus side, it at least provided an answer to the question, ‘What would a seven-seat MPV look like if it was designed to resemble a Fiat 500... by a designer who had never actually seen a Fiat 500, but only had it described to him, down the phone, in his second language?’

On the downside, it was utterly gopping to behold. As Fiat 500 impressions go, this was a morbidly obese septugenarian squeezed into a Union Jack dress, trying to pass himself off as Geri Halliwell.

Now don’t get us wrong – Top Gear is all for MPVs. Just not this one.