If you head to Fiat’s U.S. website, you might notice something different between the Fiat lineup and quite literally any other manufacturer under the Stellantis name. Specifically, you may notice that the only vehicle offered by Fiat on American turf is the Fiat 500e.
But wasn’t the Fiat 500e discontinued in 2024? The technically correct term is “paused.” In fact, the 2024 Fiat 500e has been paused several times due to low demand but remains the sole entry on the brand’s website. So what’s going on? Is this the end of Fiat as we know it? Has Fiat simply stopped producing vehicles?
Though the website’s absence of any current cars seems to bode poorly for the kicky retro brand from Italy, a little digging reveals that the brand is far from over. In fact, Fiat has quite a few things planned for the next several years.
How’s Fiat Doing?
Despite the brand’s allegedly miserable sales, the Fiat 500e has received remarkable praise from experts, including several awards. The Fiat 500e received the Vincentric Award for Best Value in America: Subcompact Segment. It was also named the 2025 Urban Green Car of the Year by Green Car Journal for the second year in a row. The all-electric vehicle won nothing but praise for its low ownership, maintenance, and operating costs. Even NACTOY, the North American Car, Truck, and Utility Vehicle of the Year Awards committee, named the Fiat 500e a semifinalist for the 2025 Car of the Year award based on the categories of “innovation, design, safety, performance, technology, user experience, driver satisfaction, and value.”
What happened? How did the ultimate vehicle for environmentally-conscious urbanites end up getting paused? And now what?
Future Plans for Fiat
The “problem” with the Fiat 500e is its overall range. The 2024 model has a driving range of about 162 miles in the city, while many of the other electric vehicles on the market can get well over 200 and even 300 miles away from home before they need a charge. Drivers see these numbers and realize they aren’t going on a lengthy road trip in a 500e.
But there’s more to it than that. The Fiat 500e may not be as long-haul-worthy as a giant three-row SUV, but it’s not supposed to be. It’s a small vehicle with a small range, designed for running around crowded urban areas. It may have a shorter range, but it also recharges quickly, recouping 40 miles in as little as five minutes at a DC charging station. The Fiat 500e can be fully recharged by the time you decide where you want to get lunch. However, North American customers are used to driving long distances across wide open spaces, not small city cars with limited range but fast recharge times, so that model just doesn’t work here.
Fiat has already addressed this conundrum. Over the next several years, Fiat and Stellantis have confirmed that they will release electric, hybrid, and ICE vehicles that are ideal for a wider range of customers. These include what Fiat has dubbed a city car, a pickup, a fastback, an SUV, and even a camper. For example, Dodge, another Stellantis brand, has already released a new Charger available either as a pure EV or with an internal combustion engine, though with an I-6 under the hood instead of the popular HEMI V8.
In a February 2024 release, Fiat CEO and global chief marketing officer for Stellantis, Olivier Francois, noted, “Fiat is a global brand with 1.3 million cars sold last year… We are in a global game and our next step will be to transition from local products to a global offer that can benefit all of our customers everywhere in the world. We are excited to share this glimpse into our future, a very near future, actually, since the first car will be presented in four months during the brand’s 125th-anniversary celebration. That car will then be followed by one new model every year.” It seems likely that the 2024 500e that launched last year will be followed by a new model, leaving many drivers and experts wondering exactly what that means.
Other Models in Other Lands
The Panda has been a Fiat legend since 1980. Over the years, this compact two-door, five-passenger hatchback has evolved considerably, growing in size and changing ever so slightly in shape to accommodate aerodynamic developments and customer tastes.
Fiat is now launching the Grande Panda in Europe, a larger SUV-style version of the classic built on Fiat’s new global multi-energy platform. As such, the Grande Panda will be launched in both electric and hybrid formats starting in the first quarter of 2025. Though limited to Europe for now, the Grande Panda has the range Americans crave. The electric version has a range of 320 km or around 200 miles. The hybrid version will include a turbocharged 1.2L engine paired with a 48V Lithium-ion battery.
Fiat also has two additional European-for-now models lined up, though official statements about these vehicles have not yet been released (as of the time of publication). The Giga Panda will be Fiat’s version of a seven-passenger SUV. While the market offers plenty of seven-passenger SUVs, we’re curious how Fiat will work its condensed-space magic to make a three-row SUV equally small and spacious.
Also floating around in concept is the Fiat 500 Torino or Ibrida, a sportier hybrid version of the 500e. Experts believe this little fun machine will appear in Europe as soon as late 2025.
Is the American Fiat 500e All Done?
Though Fiat hasn’t said anything specifically about an actual model lineup yet, they were proud to debut the new 2025 Fiat 500e Giorgio Armani Collector’s Edition at the 2024 Los Angeles Auto Show.
Though limited in production numbers, this vehicle is a true “made-in-Italy” collaboration between the Giorgio Armani design house and the Fiat Centro Stile design team. This includes upholstery with unique Chevron stitching and three-dimensional patterns, luxury fabrics with hand-embroidered accents, and other distinctive Armani design elements. Even the audio system is of the highest echelon, a seven-speaker JBL system with virtual reality audio experiences personally selected by another huge name in Italian arts, Maestro Andrea Bocelli. While it’s impractical to purchase a vehicle solely based on the audio system, we can’t help but wonder how amazing our favorite road jams would sound on a system that mimics the acoustics at Giuseppe Verdi Opera House in Pisa.
Other than this spectacular model, Fiat and Stellantis have been very quiet about the 2025 model year, leaving many American drivers curious about how this will play out for the planned models of the future. Many believe that the 500e is truly paused and that Fiat will return to America once a longer-range hybrid version has succeeded on European soil. Others believe that Fiat will pull out of U.S. markets altogether, which would be a plot twist, given the Stellantis connection. Others still believe the Panda is the way of the future and the 500 series is entirely a thing of the past.
Ultimately, however, it will be the drivers who decide Fiat’s fate. While experts love what the brand is doing, it simply doesn’t work out too well if the model doesn’t sell. Only time will tell how Fiat will regain its footing on American roads.
