Fiat Topolino review

It’s not a sportscar. Actually, it’s not a car.

Okay, so a quadricycle looks a bit like a car, but it very much isn’t one. With 8bhp to play with, you’re never going to be fast, but the Topolino really does feel sluggish – even with the electric drivetrain, the throttle map is so sedate, it feels a bit broken.

It’s super small, but not small enough to lane-split (you’d never get away with that in towns anyway), though a doozy to park. The steering is ridiculously vague and slow, though the brakes work well enough to pull the whole 475kg to a stop. Bad thoughts occur when you consider what sort of trouble you could get into with one of these with a Ducati engine in the back. It could happen. We measured.

Anyway, stupid ideas aside, the suspension feels like it’s from a shopping trolley, with the ride quality of a solid oak wardrobe.

Is it fun to drive then?

Did you just skip to this bit and not read the start? The Topolino is not fun to drive, no. Unless you’re talking about a seated version of a walking tour, or a particularly funky golf cart. 0-28mph in ten seconds is fine for inter-building transport if you work in a big office complex, or pottering to a station a couple of miles away, but not much more.

Interestingly, on the launch we actually got to drive the Topolino in Vatican City, all to do with the Vatican’s sustainable mobility development programme aimed at reducing the CO₂ footprint of its vehicle fleet, and dealing with ‘last mile’ delivery in a friendly way. Which shouldn’t actually be that difficult when your city state has pretty much everything a literal mile away, is landlocked within the bosom of Rome, has a population under 1,000 people and is officially the smallest country in the world. No wonder the Pope’s bought 20 Topolinos, then.

Interestingly, Vatican City actually encompasses just 109 acres of real estate – which isn’t even a particularly large farm – if you’re going to deal with ‘urban mobility’ it doesn’t get much more urban than that. For which, actually, the Topolino seems well-suited – though it did get a little frisky when tipped in at full-speed on the Sistine Chapel GP Circuit. One likes to think that Pope Leo was watching on and waving some sort of flag approvingly.