Dolle Dolf said:
The only people who can ever find a Fiat Cinquecento sexy are girls with a teddybear fetish, bearded city dwellers who only drive their "car" to the corner store and back, and tree huggers in various guises. Nobody who ever needs a car for what a car is needed for could ever agree.
I was transported as an early teen in the back of my aunt's Fiat 500. This was in the early-mid 70s. With my younger brother. Tallish boys. My mum and my aunt-both small women- up front. What a nightmare. This thing would wheeze along on the German autobahn being overtaken on all sides. Dangerous. A "car" totally unsuitable for anyone over 5'2''.
I am aware that the inclusion of that car, let alone calling it #1, is likely tongue in cheek. The only one of the Top Gear lot that would actually fit inside the thing would be the Hamster.
Sure it looks cute. But cute is not the same as sexy. Unless you are into teddy bears I guess.
nice post.
Picking the Fiat 500 No. 1 was defintely tongue-in-cheek
Here is what TG said about the car:
There are a million phoney psychologists in the world and every single one of them has some hackneyed theory on the relationship between sexuality and cars.
That the E-Type Jaguar, for example, is really just a phallic symbol, because its bonnet is long and essentially projects from the driver's crotch. Far too obvious.
Or that the previous Nissan Micra was modelled on a lady's bottom. But what short and vaguely curvaceous car couldn't be seen that way? In any case, the Micra was avowedly designed to appeal to women, which must mean there are more lesbians out there than we thought.
What makes a car actually sexy is something else entirely. Often, it's as much to do with who's in it. At some time you will have seen something as nasty as an old Allegro being driven by someone who looks up for it and thought, 'Wow, what a great car'.
The point about the original Cinquecento is that everyone, from strapping blokes to fainting flowers of womanhood, looks sexually charged behind its wheel. It works irrespective of age, beauty, wealth and position; even a nun in a 500 seems to telegraph a faint tingle of the procreative urge.
'Everyone, from strapping blokes to fainting flowers of womanhood, looks sexually charged behind its wheel'
Modesty must have something to do with it. It's coy, like Marvell's mistress and because it was a simple car for simple folk, conceived in a more rural age, it has raw peasant appeal, like a heaving breast or bronzed bicep glimpsed through the coarse folds of some honest rustic dress - a sackcloth smock of a car.
Art and literature have milked the image of the untutored country lass and the noble savage endlessly, and for exactly that reason. The Cinquecento feels like the same image made metal.
It has about it the allure of the wholesome and uncomplicated; it is devoid of any trappings of sexual intrigue and manipulation, and chimes with some dormant fantasy about haystacks and innocence.
Most importantly, the Cinquecento advertises nothing about its owner except, perhaps, that it's someone who doesn't need to try. So you look, and you know. You would, wouldn't you?
