2006 Fiat Panda MultiEco Concept
Since its divorce and cash-paid settlement with General Motors, Fiat has done some serious thinking about the future. After a near-death brush with accountants, the brand has moved well ahead, bouncing back from the sorry state it was in just a year ago with several new products for the Fiat brand and its luxury/performance subsidiary, Alfa Romeo, destined to enter North America by 2008.
One of the key vehicles behind the Italian firm’s rejuvenation is the Panda, a city car so impressive that it bowled over judges, winning European Car of the Year back in 2004 when it debuted. Though it is powered by an assortment of engines suitable for small kitchen appliances, Fiat’s ‘think big’ motto and practicality strong-card helped this tall, boxy, but extremely affordable Panda put young Europeans on wheels.
Given its outright popularity, Fiat has explored different themed routes with the Panda. The company’s first modification was to allow the little machine to head for the hills by jacking up the suspension, fitting it with a torquey MultiJet diesel motor and a lightweight all-wheel drive system. The result? A Panda at home in the wilderness. Fiat also added some colourful cladding and some new bodywork, spot lamps and a safari-style roofrack system to the Panda 4X4, and called it the Simba Concept. It was such a successful prototype that Fiat decided to produce it, giving it the name PandaCross. It’s an appropriately cute name for such a cute vehicle.
In more recent times, Fiat has become more serious about the environment; this year’s Geneva Show served as a platform from which the brand launched a variety of new alternative fuel technologies, including a prototype hydrogen-powered Panda, a near-production methane-powered Panda, and this, the Panda MultiEco.
As the name suggests, the MultiEco lumps together Fiat’s advancements in the environmental powertrain department. The MultiEco uses the fundamentals of the methane-powered Panda and combines it with other existing ecological engine technologies. By the way, methane-powered cars aren’t anything new; in terms of the automotive world, methane fuel is natural gas, also known as CNG, a cleaner fuel than petrol. Coincidentally, the MultiEco runs on methane, one of the primary emissions of the black-and-white, bamboo-eating Panda. All silliness aside, what the MultiEco brings to the table is a new engine that’s able to run on gasoline, CNG, or a mix of the two, and in the near future, hydrogen will be added to that list.
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