Fiat Strada – Driven To Write

Classic Road Test: 1979 Fiat Strada 75 CL 3-door

In what looks like a transcription of a period review, renowned motoring correspondent Archie Vicar peruses the interior and exterior of the Fiat Strada 75 CL and offers his opinions.

( The article first appeared in English Driver Monthly, a short-lived magazine from the Maxwell stable. Douglas Land Windingmere (sic) took the published photos. Due to cellulose oxidation of the originals, stock images have been used)

Although it has been on sale for a while (since 1978 in Europe), the Strada is new for us at English Driver Monthly and since Fiat UK offered us a test car to show off the revised shock absorbers (or some such) we could not say no to a road test report.

So, it was off to Dijon via Bruges, Brussels and Stuttgart to see if the Strada had it in itself to Continue reading “Classic Road Test: 1979 Fiat Strada 75 CL 3-door”

Ritmo Della Strada

There is a good deal more to the Ritmo than a bunch of robots and a certain confusion over its name.

Was any decade as truly modern as the 1970s? One characterised in retrospect within a roseate glow of giddy colours and lurid sartorial fashions; long hair, beards, beads and ABBA songs; what chroniclers ignore however, was how genuinely, thrillingly new it all appeared at the time and after an interval of four decades, appears to be even more so now.

In terms of product design, little that occurred in the decade that followed came even close to the impact of the ’70s. Unfortunately this was probably equally true in other areas. Ah Italy. Bastion of culture, of taste; leaders in industrial innovation and design, but fatally prey to political instability. Certainly no product of this land can Continue reading “Ritmo Della Strada”

Fiat Nox (I)

Apart from contributing more than a few inventions of enormous importance and automobiles of superior significance, Fiat have also established themselves as true masters of the counterproductive facelift.

maxresdefault — Ritmo, post surgery, photo (c) YouTube.com

Italy unquestionably is a country of immense creative energy. More to the point, it is one of the hotbeds of automotive design and style, not to mention: taste.

And yet few marques have so comprehensively struggled to give its products a stylistic boost halfway through their respective productions runs as Fiat has. So much so, in fact, that describing any facelift effort as ‘Fiat bad’ acts as a fixed term denominating a particularly ill-advised attempt at refreshing a car’s design.

So, in order to Continue reading “Fiat Nox (I)”