This tiny Fiat costs less than almost any new EV — and it isn’t even a car
Two seats, 28 mph and up to 46 miles of range: the electric Topolino starts at £8995 and revives a 1930s Fiat legend. Cheap, charming and strictly urban — here’s the catch every buyer should know first.
A brand-new electric vehicle. With a factory warranty. And one of the cheapest ways into electric motoring you’ll find anywhere. It sounds too good to be true — and then the catch turns up. Fiat has just opened UK orders for the Topolino, and here’s the twist: technically, the Topolino isn’t a car at all. It’s a tiny electric quadricycle, playing in an entirely different league. Priced from £8995 — around $11,944 — it undercuts almost every new EV on the market. But that alone doesn’t make it a do-it-all machine.
The Topolino is built for short city hops, private land and holiday resorts — in short, for places where compactness matters more than speed. Two seats, a single-speed automatic transmission, a three-position drive selector, a 6 kW electric motor and a 5.5 kWh battery. Top speed is 28 mph, or around 45 km/h. Range stretches to 46 miles, roughly 74 km on the WLTP cycle.
To a regular driver those numbers look modest. But Fiat isn’t trying to pass the Topolino off as a hatchback replacement. Its rivals are the Citroen Ami and other micro-mobility machines, where price, easy access, visibility, agility and running costs come first. Inside there are two offset seats and up to 63 litres of storage, including the Dolce Vita Box — a fabric-topped compartment right on the dashboard.
Fiat UK boss Kris Cholmondeley put it like this: “Topolino is an important part of Fiat’s sustainable micromobility strategy, delivering simple, accessible urban mobility.” It suits short journeys, leisure use and city driving, he says, while keeping the brand’s “joy, simplicity and fun.”
The name Topolino translates from Italian as “little mouse” and nods to the original Fiat 500 Topolino, built from 1936 to 1955. Back then the bet was on affordability and compact size. Now it’s on an electric format for congested cities. The circle closes.
For plenty of buyers a machine like this will always be a hard sell — for the money you could eye a used car or a budget city EV with real range. But in dense cities the Topolino plays a different game: not replacing the family car, but covering the short daily run without the parking pain or the surplus hardware.