Storytelling. That’s what Fiat CEO Olivier Francois says separates Fiat from the wave of affordable new (mostly) Chinese EVs. He’s quite the raconteur himself, has an Instagram teeming with A-list contacts, and cheerfully admits that the new Grande Panda needs to be a blockbuster.

“Heritage is key,” he explains. “Our design is rooted in our heritage, and that’s not by chance. It’s a good way of reassuring our customers. There are new brands but, hey, they come and they go. We’ve been here for 125 years—and we’re here to stay.”

As with Renault’s rapturously received new 5, the Grande Panda pulses with a palpable confidence. With its ’80s video-game-referencing pixel LEDs, chunky stance, and cheery color scheme (no gray, by order of its maker), the Panda manages to deliver a Proustian rush without looking lazily retro. Credit to exterior designer Francois Leboine and his team, it looks especially fresh on simple steel wheels. (Leboine, it’s worth noting, did the R5 before leaving Renault.)

“Panda” is inscribed in low relief lettering on the side, in case you forget the name of the car, and these can be filled in with protective padding. The Fiat logo and four-bar monogram—which arrived 40 years ago on the Uno—are mixed and matched on the seats, door trims, and wheel arch surround and are laser-etched into the C pillar. Everyone involved, you sense, has brought their A game. Including those unsung heroes in the product planning department.

In the UK, prices for the Panda start at £20,975 for the entry-level Red version, rising to £24,000 for the top-spec La Prima model. A cheaper, 1.3-liter hybrid will be along soon, but for now the focus is on the fully electric model, with its circa 200-mile range. This, then, is the car that promises to do for the EV what the epochal Nuova 500 did for Italian mass mobility just as la dolce vita was hovering into view in the late ’50s.

Urban Utility

Masterful packaging is part of its DNA, but the original 1980 Panda is the clearer inspiration for the new car. That was designed by the maestro Giorgetto Giugiaro, still alive and riding a trail bike aged 86, and a man who dismisses his contribution to automotive design as mere “problem solving.”

Well, there’s plenty of those to circumvent on affordable electric city cars. Various versions of new Panda wait in the wings, but the Grande arrives measuring a solitary millimeter shy of four meters in length. The original was actually created to mimic the rustic charms of the Renault 4, and to this day 4x4 versions of the Panda can be seen in remote and indeed fashionable parts of Italy. With no all-wheel-drive version planned, Fiat still leans pretty hard into the idea of utility on the Panda, with clever interior storage spaces and slightly elevated stance and visibility. A UV BEV. It might catch on.

Egregiously expensive as car making is, the new Grande Panda is only possible thanks to the synergies at work across Fiat’s parent company, Stellantis. It uses the group’s new global “Smart Car” architecture, a cost-effective modular platform that underpins the latest Citroën C3 and Vauxhall Frontera, and can accept pure combustion, hybrid, and electric powertrains.

Bigger and smaller batteries are under development, but the Panda, with its 361 liters of boot space, lands touting a 44-kWh battery, an 83-kW electric motor, and a WLTP-verified range of 199 miles. Rivals such as the Renault 5 and Hyundai Inster do better, but they’re also notably more expensive. Fiat is banking on Panda owners being mostly urban types, so the eternally tricky battery/range balance is probably about right.

They’ll appreciate the 4.5-meter-long integrated charging cable, which tidies away neatly into a special receptacle hidden behind a logo-ed flap in the car’s nose. It’s only rated up to 7 kW, so good for anyone with off-street parking and a domestic wall-changer. Less useful in the city.

It can charge the battery from 20 to 80 percent in 3 hours 43 minutes, Fiat claims. You can option to 11-kW AC, but that runs via the same rear charging port as the DC fast-charging one, so we wouldn’t bother. Find a 100-kW charger and the little Fiat will charge from 20 to 80 percent in 33 minutes.

No More Than It Needs

To drive, the Panda is as good as it needs to be and nothing more. The primary controls are all nicely weighted without flooding your senses in feel or feedback, and a 0-62 mph time of 11 seconds pretty much sums up the Panda’s “whatevs” attitude to performance. It also has a top speed you might actually achieve, given that it’s just 82 mph. Again, that’ll do just fine, and on the Italian B-roads and autostrada we tested it on, it feels sprightly, corners adroitly, and is nicely damped.

Even on the gnarliest surfaces it serves up a big-car suppleness. Equally important, it’s refined at motorway speeds, with only modest amounts of wind or road noise. In mixed driving in pretty chilly weather, we were averaging around 3 miles per kWh, for a real-world range of 132 miles. Expect more when the sun shines—and if you drive more sensibly. We’d say 150 miles tops.

Lane-departure assist and a speed-limit alert are present and bong with an irritating shrillness. However, separate switches get rid of those intrusions. Apart from a “C” for coast, you’ll look in vain for any drive mode, though. Not that kind of car.

But that’s OK too, because there’s visual entertainment all over the Panda’s interior. The dash itself is an elongated oval that mimics Fiat’s celebrated Lingotto building (the one with the test track on the roof as featured in 1969’s The Italian Job). The seats, inscribed with a “Panda made with love in Fiat” message and “squircle” motif, are terrific. The main instruments use an imaginative, nicely legible font, and the touchscreen is easy to use. phones mirroring is simple. And the designers have gone all in on the sustainability: Each Grande Panda contains the recycled material from 140 drink cartons, using the 20 percent that can’t be recycled in the denim blue plastic on the door trims.

La Prima–spec cars get a storage compartment ahead of the passenger that uses real bamboo fibers. Rear seat space is more than adequate. We also like the Perspex on the end of the dash, the vertical air vents, and the plentiful storage areas. Fiat calls it “iconic ironic.” We’re just glad they didn’t write that all over the interior, too.

The entry-level model gets rotary controls for climate control, which are actually preferable to the posher trim’s buttons. La Prima gets you niceties such as a heated seat and steering wheel, rear-view camera, and wireless charging for your phones. You don’t need a whole lot more.

But you could do with less. In an even cheaper European version of the Grande Panda, the Hybrid Pop (approximately $19,600), that will not be coming to the UK, Fiat has done away with the infotainment screen altogether. Instead it has a built-in mount allowing you to use your smartphones as the control system. It’s a neat, money-saving choice that mirrors how some interior designs are getting increasingly minimalist. Some might miss the built-in screen, but there will be many others who will like such an elegantly frugal option. Thoughtfully, Fiat has installed a USB port right next to the mount to keep phoness charged.

From what we gather, this urban EV is “under consideration” for the US but as yet not confirmed—which may intrigue WIRED's very own NY-based Fiat fan. The Grande Panda is a smart car, made by a clever bunch of engineers and marketeers who’ve spent the money in all the right places. You don’t need to know Fiat’s history to get it, but it’s a bonus if you do. We reckon this’ll be a lot of people’s first EV, which gives this particular story a new twist.