In spring 1992, Fiat had a problem it was proud of.
The Cinquecento had just launched, a boxy replacement for the 126 drawn in-house at Centro Stile by Ermanno Cressoni’s team, and Fiat wanted it celebrated. At the Turin Motor Show. ANFIA, the Italian motor industry association, invited the country’s coachbuilders to reinterpret it at Fiat’s own invitation. Maggiora brought the Birba, a four-seat cabriolet. Bertone brought the Rush, a dune buggy. Pininfarina made a four-wheel-drive pick-up. Italdesign brought the ID Cinquecento.
The ID was a static model, a full-size mock-up with MPV proportions and dark glass hiding an interior that didn’t exist yet. It was the only entry that looked like it might replace the car it was riffing on. Fiat looked at it and passed.
Italdesign didn’t. A year later, in 1993, the mock-up came back as a running prototype called the Lucciola, shown at the Bologna Motor Show and later at Geneva. Fabrizio Giugiaro is credited with the design, working alongside his father Giorgetto. The name is a nod to the small Fiat-based cars that Francis Lombardi built and called Lucciola, “firefly”.
Underneath it was stranger than it looked. The body was aluminium and recycled plastic, 3.27 metres long, with a roof that retracted in two sections. The drivetrain was a hybrid, in 1993: a 0.49-litre two-cylinder diesel making 5.5 kW, plus two 7 kW electric motors at the rear. That added up to roughly 25 horsepower and a top speed of 100 km/h. Italdesign quoted about 50 km on electric power alone, or around eight hours with the diesel running.
It was a clever little thing, and Fiat still didn’t want it. No source I found gives a documented reason. The Italian press calls it legend, and one Czech writer says it was simply too early and didn’t pay. What Fiat did instead is on the record. The Cinquecento soldiered on for seven years and more than 1.1 million cars, then in early 1998 it was facelifted and relaunched as the Seicento, which ran until 2010.
Italdesign shopped the design around, and Daewoo bought it. Until the mid-90s, Daewoo’s cars had been rebadged GM designs, and it wanted something of its own for Europe. The aluminium and the hybrid were dropped. What came out in 1998 was a five-door steel hatchback on the old Daewoo Tico platform, with the Tico’s 0.8-litre three-cylinder engine. It kept the round headlights, the tall rounded body and the short nose. It was called the Matiz.
The Matiz sold. It was Daewoo’s best seller in Europe for four years, built in the company’s Polish and Romanian plants. A 1.0-litre engine arrived in 2001 and a facelift followed (the M150). When General Motors took over Daewoo in 2002 the car carried on, and in 2005 it was reworked and sold as a Chevrolet. In 2006 GM accused Chery of copying it with the QQ, which is a strange thing to say about a car that was itself Fiat’s reject. It reportedly even outsold the Seicento in Italy.
So Fiat spent 1998 selling its old Cinquecento with a new face. Daewoo spent it selling Fiat’s replacement.