I promise that a full Fiat 850 CC is coming soon. I have pictures of both the Spider and the sedan, but haven’t encountered a Coupe in the wild, yet. But steve_t509 has, somewhere in California. No big surprise there, as these little buzz-bombs weren’t exactly very rust-resistant. As it is, this one is showing some signs of skin cancer. But it’s still on the road, and if you ever see one of these in traffic, it practically disappears, given how tiny they are.
The 850 Coupe was the cheapest way to experience the Italian sporty car mystique. All the proper mini-Ferrari cues were accounted for: proper two-dial dash nacelle with giant tachometer, Nardi-style steering wheel, “wood” applique on the dash, pleather pleated buckets, and a screaming little engine barely an arms-length away that begged to be caned with the crisp floor shifter. Love Italian Style, on a serious budget.
Yes, some rust is almost inevitable, even in sunny California. Nothing to serious, from the looks of it. Just needs some love, American style.
I loved these little coupes years ago though they went rusty here before the warranty was out and are now seriously hard to find. If I see one I will shoot it for the cohort.
I last saw one of these in 1974,my English teacher had one the same colour.I
It was in a dentist’s parking lot on Middlefield, Palo Alto, just about exactly a year ago (Jan 12, 12). I’ve got a total of 13 pics, but these 4 were the best. Never saw it before or since. But it’s clearly been in the area for most if not all of its life:
You know I think one of the few times I wouldn’t wanna drive a car like this would be right after getting a tooth pulled… OW!!
Is this the place where I brag about never having dental pain? When I had all four wisdom teeth pulled, I was sore for about a day, and after that it was tender because it was healing, but never hurt. Never needed painkillers except for ibuprofen on the first day.
1973, senior in high school, my first job. My boss drove this exact car. Couldn’t have been more than a couple years old. Already had rust perforation (Fiats don’t like Wisconsin). Kept the local independent import repair shop in business for years.
BTW, I once had a sales guy at an Alfa Romeo dealership in Milwaukee tell me how they had to rotate the new Alfas on the lot because if left in one place too long they would leave rust stains on the pavement.
So cool… probably the most fun you can have under 50HP, on 4 wheels at least. Love everything about this car, and everything about this one in particular. It’s yellow paint has aged very nicely and those alloy wheels up front look great – needs a matching pair in back. I dunno what kind they are but I see similar ones on X1/9s (and 131s) sometimes. I’m guessing these ones are probably 12 inchers and tracking down any extras would be tough.
IMO, this was the best 850 body style. I’ve never seen one in person, though. If I ever see any 850, which is very rare, it’s always a Spider… and I didn’t even know the sedan made it to the USA! That should be interesting.
Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” just came up on shuffle and it’s really making me wish I was somewhere sunny on the left coast, behind that beautiful wooden wheel carving up some deserted and twisty back road while that song creaked out of the AM radio and 850cc’s roared up to 7k rpms behind me.
Sean,
This was a pushrod motor, probably not worth more than 5500. My 128 with the monster motor OHC 1100 cc unit was redlined at 6250. Couldn’t rev any higher since the airflow through the carb reached the speed of sound at this rpm. Cheap rev limiter.
Fiat 850 stock 903cc engine factory specs: 52hp @6500 rpm. 7000 rpm? easy….
Abarth Fiat 850 (850TC Corsa): 78hp @8000 rpm (still pushrods) 9000 rpm? pushing it a bit, but quite doable…
7 liter Chevy LS7: 7100 rpm redline (also pushrods)
1978 Honda 500 CX twin: 9,650 rpm redline (yes, that was an unusual engine for Honda, with pushrods). The Honda 500 CX displacement per cylinder was almost exactly the same as the Fiat.
Pushrods ultimately can’t rev as high as an OHC engine, but they’re not as much of a limitation to high rpm as they’re sometimes made out to be.
Even some of the more gnarly factory V8s from wayback were capable of fairly high revs. I only knew the Fiat was good for 7,000rpm because that figure always stuck in my mind out of it’s R&T road test – seemed impressive for an old pushrod four, no matter how tiny.
I think it was James May driving the new Fiat 500 who said “rev it until the valves jump out and dance on the bonnet” (hood to you Americans!)
NASCAR pushrod engines can rev to 9500+ all day long. But they cost a buttload ($100,000+).
The specs that Fiat quotes are one thing, but what was achievable was another.
The 280Z that I drove at Bondurant was redlined at 5500 RPM. But in reality, anything above 5100 just produced noise. But that was OK, since at certain tracks, such as Sears Point through the esses, it was preferable not to upshift from 3rd to 4th as this potentially upset the car.
Even with an OHC car, as our Bilstein Rabbit, everything had to be in perfect tune to reach 7000 RPM. Perfect tune in any car with Bosch ignition was a bitch.
Redline and max hp rpm are not necessarily the same thing. Redline is the top safe operating rpm, almost always higher than max hp rpm, sometimes quite a bit. Some engines drop off quicker from their power peak than others….but Fiats tended to be sopranos, as long as they weren’t strangled by smog controls.
I have a friend with an 850 Spider, and it happily turns 6500+rpm. He keeps it in good tune, which is of course necessary, as you said. The reality is that in a 52 hp Fiat, one pretty much has to make use of the power peak fairly often.
i believe the redline on the tach of our 124s was 8000. not that i ever got close
My first car was an 850 Spider. A 1973. Being an over exuberant 16 YO I thought I was the next Mario, even with a meesly 904cc of Italian muscle under the hood(trunk?). Not to long after my purchase, and yes I did buy it with my own cash in the form of a loan from the local bank, can’t do that today, I promptly drove right over my head and did a double 360 degree spin out off a bridge by the house flipping the damn thing on top of me. Talk about lucky,second chance,etc. All I got was a five inch gash on my left forearm from where a tree branch caught me on the way down. Dad was pissed and mom? Well let’s say I didn’t get to buy my first motorcycle until I moved out of her house. My older brother got me hooked on 850’s as he had a 71 Spider. So off with the insurance check to buy 850 number two. A 71 bright red roadster just like the other two in the family. I wanted an earlier version with the slanted headlamps instead of the quasi-frog eyes but this second car kind of fell into my lap,as in the price was right, so off for stage two of over exuberence. Well not quite. I had Spider2 for a little over a year at that point and one day the oil pressure fell off and as I pulled off to the shoulder of the road and got out to inspect what the cause might be I noticed the drain plug on the motor was missing. This was the first major expence that either of us had. The second was when all of the CV joints went out on my brothers Spider. Any way while Spider2 was in the shop getting a set of undersized bearings installed good ole dad found a 71 240Z sitting on the local Datsun dealers lemon lot. Oh did I mention this all happened around 1976-1978. Funny how cheap I was able to buy these cars when they were just a few years old. I would kill to have a $75.00 car payment again. Seeing as I had paid off the bank note after the insurance company, more or less, paid me to total out Spider1, I had more than enough credit to buy the Z-Car. Tony(nom-d-plume)down at the import garage took a fancy to my sports car and gave me the down payment in trade for the title so after that I was a Japanese sports car driver. Boy what a difference a solid roof and double the horsepower had on me after that. My brother continued on with the Fiat experience. His 850 Spider bit the dust after the oil pan got ripped off while crossing a set of nasty railroad tracks on the other side of town. He rightfully turned around and bought an X1/9 and bought everything out of the Forza-Faza(?) catalog until a new Saab 99 caught his fancy. In retrospect I have to say these Fiats were completely reliable. But than what do a couple of teenagers care about quality and relabilty? Certainly not us! Fiddling with our cars on a sub-zero midwestern morning so we could get to school was a rite-of-passage in our book. Same with our weekly excursions to the import car salvage yard. After the 240Z I went domestic and haven’t bought another import since. Mrs Louie on the other hand….wants a new 500. You know if I won the lottery tomorrow I wouldn’t mind having the Abarth. But than with my luck I would find a rather nice example of an Abarth’d 850 Spider just after that purchase. Seems like a really,really nice example of the cars I had are going for Hemi money today. Oh well,maybe when I retire.
Great story, as usual. I love those Spiders, although I could never fit properly in one…
We had an 850 Spider, just before I reached driving age Dad traded it for a VW. I wonder why…..
Those front wheels look like late 70s SR5 Toyota Corolla wheels.
Those are authentic vintage alloys; the Corolla wheels (steel) were imitations of these.
I don’t remember (and my pics don’t show) how many of each wheel were on the car.
Neat car! It immediately reminded me of the VW Fastback, which appears to be a contemporary to the 850…
In the mid seventies and early eighties, I had two of the coupes and a spider. The first was a green coupe that had a blown motor and terminal rust. This was a free car, haul it off and it is yours. This was in south Alabama, but the rust was still bad. I paid $100.00 for a green spider that had a bad left front wheel bearing. A half hour after I got it home, it had a bearing taken from the coupe and I was driving it. The top was worn out and I replaced it with a top from J C Whitney. The floor was rusted out. On the spider the floor was a two piece stamping that made an X-frame in the floor. That was rusted away. Being young, poor and stupid, I replaced the x-frame with swing set tubing of approximately the right size. For the floor, I cut the roof off the coupe and welded it in as a floor. I drove the car for two years, when I got a letter from Fiat calling the car in for an inspection. The car went up on the lift and I never drove it again. Fiat gave me $400.00 for the car, so I did not do too bad.
One night a friend and I were going to a motorcycle shop, owned by another friend. We stopped at a traffic light and the truck behind us started blowing his horn. I looked back and he yelled “your car is on fire”. We got out and raised the engine cover. The fuel hose had cracked and every time the fuel pump stroked, a small jet of gasoline squirted out. It had caught fire. I leaned over and blew the fire out, thanked the truck driver, we got in and drove off.
These cars were great fun for poor car nuts of the time. We had a wonderful time back then with cheap foreign cars.
Nice, but please, please! make a CC on the Fiat 124 Sport/Coupe/CC/CA whatever it is. I see one in my walking route and that Fiat DOHC engine sound is just lovely (they copied the sound track in the current 500 Abarth). I still hold in my mind an obscure project involving a 131 2000 with a MS, ITBs and possibly a turbo.
Are these rear/mid engined like the 850 Roadster or front?
They’re all the same: water cooled straight four hanging out the ass end. The 850 was an evolution of the 600 (not 500). Typically for Fiat (and others at the time) the Spider was designed and built by Pininfarina, with totally different styling, but on the same platform. The Spider was very cute….
Oh gawd, I totally adore these roadsters. As I said above, we had one in my pre-driving teens. Dad and I would go out on Sunday drives in the country top down. Totally hooked me on little roadsters. Dad ditched it after just a year or two, before I started driving. Probably just ahead of the rust monster as it turned out too. I’ve heard of one owner who climbed into his 850 one day only to have the driver’s seat fall through to the ground.
There are one or two in Portland, it’s a very rare sight. Can’t wait to see your CC.
Dang. Where’s the like button?!
I’ve never, ever seen one of these in the flesh, cute but to me the spider it’s the real looker of the bunch ! The sedan on the other hand it’s one of those cars I’ve always associated with older priests and nuns…
850 Spiders! I love em, but could never fit in one! Not ever. I saw one about three weeks ago crossing Carmel on Barstow. It was a lovely bright green color. To far away for a pic though.
I remember looking at the spiders at the local import dealership in the early ’70s. My budget said used MGB, so instead of a new unreliable car I had a used unreliable car. Still like the looks, though I remember the last years as having kind of poor interior panels.
Never saw any coupes in Illinois, though spiders were fairly common, especially at school in Champaign-Urbana. By the time I could (barely) afford a new car, I flirted with a 124 spider til the bank said NO, so I ended up with a Celica. That beast always got me home and was a blast to drive. Never considered Italian again.
For what it’s worth, at 6-2″ I used seat rail extenders in the Celica. I was able to get into the 850, but I don’t recall driving one. I do remember a wildly unsuccessful attempt at getting into a Lotus Europa. My body is unsuitable for yoga and really small cars…
wonderful. When I was little, these were not uncommon
love these, especially the spyders. think the “wood” is real. at least it was in my father’s 124s.
http://flic.kr/p/9Gz3uS
Naw. On my Spider anyway, it was wood vinyl on a metal molding. The steering wheel was simulated plastic wood too. I would(wood!pun!) think if it was real wood or veneer it would have splintered from the humidity like an old Jaguar or Benz.
Those YIG-prefix California plates would have been issued in 1969, so the car’s at least that old.
VIN is 100GBC 0235242. Any Fiat experts out there?
Judging by the gold on black license tag it would be 1969 or later. 1970 was the first year they had the gold on blue tags.
My Dad had a white soft top spider back in the mid ’70s. Strangely, it was a right hand drive model as left handed cars were banned here in Hong Kong. My brother was old enough to borrow it, but I was not. We kids use to sit on the back deck on the way to the beach until a passing policeman pulled my Dad over to remonstrate with him how dangerous it was.
Things went south when he drove it to a ‘Burns night’, leaving it outside overnight with the roof down. Returning the following morning, the poor thing was filled to the windscreen with rain water.
It was off to the scrapyard not long afterwards.
My parents bought one of these coupes for my brother when he turned 21 in 1969. It was a cute little car, but my memory is that from the onset of cold weather in November it was increasingly temperamental. Over the next two years it was regularly in the shop for one thing or another, and rust appeared early on. I think he sold it after about 2 years. Nova Scotia was not kind to Fiats.
When I made my second move to San Francisco, mid-summer of ’75, I met Greg Zimmerman almost right away, and he had a Fiat 850 Series II Coupe. His was a nice dark green with tan interior, and in really xlnt shape__until one day after it had rained and he was coming down California Street, and managed to get his tires hooked into the wet streetcar’s tracks; the Ability to Brake and Steer (soon to be known as ABS) alluded him, and into the big sedan’s chrome bumper in front of him he went!
Not too serious as far as collisions go, at relatively low speed in SF’s rush hour traffic, but poor Diana in the passenger seat got a busted lip out of the ordeal, and it banged up the sheetmetal, bent the bumper and broke the inside hdlts.
I knew Greg from working for his Mom, an employee supervisor at the California Barristers Association, and become good friends with her and her husband Doug Doerfler too. Good times!
I don’t know if Greg’s 850 ran to 7000 RPM, but it wasn’t for his lack of trying! I think he wrung the daylights out of every gear, and every shift (consider the *terrain* in San Francisco…) and though we likely rarely exceeded the speed limits, that little “buzz bomb” was always screaming, and seemingly, begging for more.
If I could find the right one today, I’d like to have my own 850 Coupe__ideally, dark green w/tan, though black w/red is a 2nd choice__sharing the garage with our ’57 Healey 2-seater, ’99 M Coupe (with Eurosport twinscrew supercharger), ’99 M Rdstr and ’01 M Rdstr. I wonder if Hand’s ever made their alloy wheels in a 12″ diameter…?
More good times!