Welcome back after watching the Fiat 126 video! I did that a few days ago. The way that I
do these videos is I do the stuff the camera then I mix it all together. I do all the video editing
and put all the images and videos and things on top of it, and while I was doing it I was
noticing down in this corner - it seems dark, and I'm wondering - I'm not quite sure why it's doing
that. I've started having a light ring here to try and give myself some more light. Maybe that's
offsetting the colour balance (brightness settings of the camera). That's more than you need to know!
Anyway it was annoying me this, little dark spot down here.
Anyway, the Fiat 126. I poured over the "What Car" magazine in the 1980s, looking for the best car
with a 0-60 time, or different things like this. This is how I found that the Citroën BX, that the
diesel one had a 0-60 in less than 10 seconds, which I thought was the coolest thing ever!
But I also found the cheapest car you could possibly buy in the 1980s in Britain was the
Fiat 126, and I did consider it. It was something like £2,500 or something like that at the time,
and I thought "Yeah I could kind of afford that. Maybe I could buy myself a brand new car. Wouldn't
it be really cool!". I'm not sure I would really have loved the car too much, but anyway
that's the introduction I had to the Fiat 126 - was just sort of
almost the "Top Trumps", trying to look at the different car statistics.
But I had a really soft spot for... I love small cars. The smaller the better, and I mean as they
get so small it becomes impractical to drive them, and the Fiat 126 was definitely bordering on the
threshold of being practical. But I love small cute cars and as I say I was thinking about maybe
I would go and buy one of these cars. But to me cars in those days when I first got my driving
licence, it was "four wheels and freedom". My parents had said "don't get a motorbike. They're
dangerous. You shouldn't get one of those." But it's definitely looking at a car and trying to
go out and be less constrained. But I'm not sure the Fiat 126 would have been the best car for me.
I was a bit of a boy racer. I drove a little bit too fast when I was younger and in the car
that size with how dangerous it was - there's nothing around you. I may not be around today!
But the Fiat 126, it was a very simple car. It was very bare bones, very basic, it was very light.
I seem to recall a friend told me he had friends at university, and apparently as a prank a few of
them got around a friend's Fiat 126 and lifted it over a fence, and put it in someone's garden, and
it was a car that was that light. That you could basically do that. There was really nothing to it.
One thing I didn't mention in the video, but was kind of interesting is the wash wipe
facility for the windscreen wipers. It was literally a button which physically was...
you pressed that and it physically actuated the wash wipe. It wasn't in the electrical part of it,
wasn't any motor doing anything, was your physical motion on the button was actually providing the
pump to put the water on the screen, and it was updated to an automatic electronic one in
this big sweeping update they did in 1985 that made the car look a lot more practical. It had a
turning ignition that allowed you to start it in a less convoluted way.
But as I say in the early days it was a very simple car and it was the perfect car when it was
launched in 1972 to capitalise on the 1973 fuel crisis, which I talk about incessantly in my
videos, because a lot of them cover the 1970s, but also because it was a such a big shock on
the car industry, and big gas-guzzling cars ended up being something that went the way of the dodo,
and people were all looking for very fuel economical cars, and that generally meant
very small cars, and the Fiat 126 was in the perfect position to capitalise on that.
So, when I do these videos I go and find a whole lot of old photographs and videos and things like
that and when I was doing the bit about everything from the Fiat 124 to the Fiat 133 I thought I'd go
and get a photograph of every single car, and in the process I found this picture of possibly
the coolest dashboard ever, which is from the 1970 Fiat 130, and there were a couple of other
photographs that showed different dashboards, but this one is the coolest thing ever!
OK, so moving on. There are a couple of quotes that I found while I was looking into this and
I thought I'd share them with you because I just thought they were really rather priceless. But I
couldn't just completely rip them off and put them in my main video. So, the first one is "In theory
having the engine behind you means the noise goes that way too. But the Niki (that's the Australian
Fiat 126) wasn't fast enough to dispel its own noise." I love that idea. The second one is "The
Fiat 126 in the face of some of today's hedonistic cars almost takes on the flavor of simple
and popular things like a succulent piece of fresh baked foccacia or a beautiful frozen Peroni,
instead of macrobiotic salad and a diet fruit juice." I just love that idea. It's
simple and basic just like a basic kind of bread. I love that turn of phrase. It's very good.
It's also surprising that this car could pull a caravan.
In America where I am, the only things that would pull caravans or "5th wheelers" or
things like that are these ginormous trucks. But certainly in Britain you would get Ford
Cortinas pulling caravans and things like that. I remember a friend had I think a 1300 or 1600
Ŝkoda that did the same thing. But to do it with a 600cc Fiat 126 is taking the biscuit. So, this
caravan must have been incredibly light, and I love the practicality of it. It had a full bed,
it had a stove, it had a sink, it had a fridge. It was an amazing little caravan.
So, the Fiat 126, it finally ends production in Italy in 1979 - 1980 time, after about seven years
or so seven or eight years. But then it starts production in Poland which is going to last...
well it continues the production in Poland, but that goes on for another 20 years, and it's
interesting that normally when car companies do that they're trying to scale back production, and
sort of end of life the car, and yet they then start expanding sales to Australia in 1989.
So who was doing that? Was it FSM of Poland was trying to push that? Was it Fiat was
trying to push that? I mean it's a 17 year old car at this point, and it's based on
1950s technology. It's a seriously old car. And obviously they're selling it on price.
It's just an odd thing to do. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. But I mean
they sold a few cars for three years so I guess it worked out for them.
Certainly if it was FSM it showed their entrepreneurial spirit with doing that,
and also doing all the different custom versions they did. The open top version, and particularly
the version in the 1980s they did that was highly aerodynamic. It was something that looked a little
bit like the Fiat Cinquecento that came after it. As I said it took eight years until they stopped producing it,
and then another 20 years the Fiat 126 was in production. If you compare that to the Fiat 500,
that ended production after only three years after the 126 was introduced. So,
for the 126 to go for another 20 years after it essentially ended production, and 11 of those
years it was still being sold in Western Europe alongside the Fiat Panda, it did very, very well.
And it's likely it wouldn't have lasted that long if it wasn't for the FSM production.
Poland desperately needed western money. They had workers that were paid very little, as I
said in the video, and so they were able to do a very cut price car. As I said it was the cheapest
car I saw in the 1980s for just £2,500, and of course it was a testament to the Polish workers,
that they were making a car that was pretty good quality. It was a good enough quality that
Fiat thought that they could sell it to different markets.
One thing I do try to get right in my video - I spend a lot of time on it - people may not think
I do, but I do, is trying to get different names right, and hearing it back Giovanni Michelotti,
I think I said Giovanni Michelotti, and that bugs me that I didn't quite get it right,
and I spent a lot of time trying to do it. But the biggest one is the Fiat Cinquecento
which I was doing that in the video, and I say it right in the video as far as you can tell,
but I said it right once and I say it I think four times in the video but the other three
times I said Chiquicento which is obviously not quite right. It should be Cinquecento. So I had to
take the one time it was right and then sort of copy it to all the three of the places,
because of all the wonderful things you can do in audio editing of videos.
So Tom Hanks has this running gag... this is relevant,
mark my words! I'll get to this. It is relevant to the Fiat 126. He has this running gag where he has
photographs taken. He goes and walks to different streets and then he sort of grabs
the door handle of a car and someone takes a photograph of him, and he says "Hey look
at my new car!" and of course it's this sort of weird crazy car, and there's been a few times
when he's seen a Fiat 126 when he's filming in Europe, and he's done that and taken a picture,
and it's gone viral, and people are going "oh look, Tom Hanks has got a Fiat 126.".
So, apparently the city of Bielsko-Biaka - I'm probably saying that wrong - that's
one of the cities that did Fiat 126 production. In fact, it was the first city that did Fiat 126
production in Poland. They liked this image of Tom Hanks with the Fiat 126 so much that they actually
got one prepared. A used one. They sort of did it up and made it look good. They did it especially
for him, and they sent it to him in 2017 which was very nice of them, and a nice little gesture,
and it got auctioned off for charity in March 2022, March of this year, for $83,500 for charity.
So, I thought that was a nice little thing. Anyway I thought I'd mention that because all the times
I was searching for the Fiat 126, all I saw was these things about Tom Hanks, and it was a nice
little story that apparently he had this car for five years. It was serviced just a year before,
so he was obviously keeping it up and looking after it. Anyway, enough of that, enough of Tom
Hanks. You've had enough of me! Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video!