7 short years ago, Sergio Marchionne, CEO of Fiat Chrysler, was begging people not to buy the battery electric Fiat 500e. He told an audience at the Brookings Institute, “I hope you don’t buy it because every time I sell one, it costs me $14,000.”
Today, Fiat is singing a very different tune. According to Autocar, Fiat boss Olivier François announced this week, “Between 2025 and 2030, our product lineup will gradually become electric only. This will be a radical change for Fiat. The decision to launch the new 500 — electric and electric alone — was actually taken before Covid-19. Even then, we were already aware that the world could not take any more compromises. We were reminded of the urgency of taking action, of doing something for the planet Earth.”
Why is this important? Because Fiat, for all of its long and illustrious history as an automaker, has been primarily a purveyor of mass market cars — the vehicles that ordinary people use for ordinary purposes. Browse through the thousands of stories CleanTechnica has done about electric cars and many of them are focused on cars that appeal to customers at the upper end of the automobile market, people who buy Porsches, Audis, BMWs, and Mercedes. We have even covered electric cars from manufacturers of exotic cars like Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Rimac.
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General Motors says it will go all electric in 2035. Fiat intends on getting there 5 years sooner than that. EVs aren’t just for the wealthy any more. They are for everyday transportation for everyday people who do everyday things.
Fiat has just introduced a new version of the 500e built on a dedicated EV chassis which will likely also be used for the upcoming Centoventi Concept EV. That concept, for all intents and purposes, is a preview of the next generation Fiat Panda. For now, Fiat’s focus is on city cars, but in the future it will also develop EVs on the STLA platform used by Stellantis for the Peugeot e-208 and Vauxhall Corsa-e. Sales of the 500e have been red hot in the home market recently.
The company is not just focused on building electric cars. It has plans to address the need for EV chargers in communities with lots of apartments and condominiums and is looking to increase the number of fast-charging points available to customers
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Source: Clean Technica
