Interior
What is it like on the inside?
The interior of the 500C is festooned with neat little 500 Easter eggs that you’ll enjoy showing off to passengers. Sorry, your passenger. Best save the back seats for cats, or shopping.
There’s a neat little cubby in the centre of the dash where you’ll pop your phone if you’ve got the wireless charging option, and that has a silhouette of the Turin skyline marked out on it. Look inside the door grab handles and you’ll see the outline of a classic 500 and the words ‘Made in Torino’. Some of the wobbly fixtures and fittings might have been Easter eggs too, but we couldn’t be sure.
It’s all very stylish inside the 500C – which is great, but the chic interior writes cheques that the car can’t cash. You see a sharp interior and it communicates certain premium pretensions, but the Fiat just isn’t able to follow those up. This is a car that peaks at over £30k, remember, not the old petrol version they wang out at £13k.
The touchscreen tech works well, though, and the buttons inside the cabin are sensibly laid out. The steering wheel is a chunky, tactile number and the buttons to change gear on the central part of the dash just below the aircon also work well. The buttons on the doors to open up are a little gimmicky, but worth it for watching people try to work out how they’re supposed to get out. There are mechanical releases lower down in an emergency, but there’s always the roof if you need it.
Which, incidentally, is the biggest draw on the 500C. It shifts back in stages, if you just want a sunroof-style opening or something in-between. Driving with the roof open lends the 500C a real sense of occasion and it’s particularly useful for sightseeing. A rail above the windscreen does its best to keep wind out of the cabin when you’re enjoying the dolce vita, but the noise it generates does rather cancel out the benefits of a silent running electric powertrain.
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