Fiat Multipla: The Ugliest Car Ever Made Was a Masterpiece

In 1999, the Museum of Modern Art put a Fiat Multipla on display beside the General Motors EV1 and the Toyota Prius.Top Gear named it Car of the Year.They also called it one of the ugliest cars on the road.Because underneath the face that made the Multipla a punchline was one of the cleverest family cars ever designed.Fiat had been given an almost impossible brief:Six adults.Their luggage.And a car less than four metres long.The solution was unlike almost anything else on the road.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━📚 ORDER MY NEW BOOK "History Written by Losers" — out now!The true story of global power has been whitewashed by the victors and the fixers. This book tells the side of history they tried to bury.👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🏁 IN THIS EPISODEWe trace the story of the Fiat Multipla, from a bizarre design brief in the mid-1990s to one of the strangest and most ingenious production cars ever sold.Fiat wanted six proper seats and usable luggage space inside a car less than four metres long.Instead of using three rows like its rivals, designer Roberto Giolito turned the problem sideways.Three seats across the front.Three across the back.The result was a car shorter than the hatchback it was based on, but wide enough to carry six adults and still offer 430 litres of luggage space.Then Fiat had to engineer a car around it.The Multipla received its own unusual steel spaceframe, a completely flat floor and a double-decker structure that hid the exhaust, fuel system and even compressed-natural-gas tanks underneath the cabin.Its strange glasshouse was inspired by the canopy of an Agusta A109 helicopter.Its front lights were spread across three separate levels.Its centre front seat could fold into a table.And removing the rear seats turned 430 litres of luggage room into around 1,900 litres of flat cargo space.There were even factory-built methane versions.The Multipla Bipower could switch between petrol and natural gas while driving.The even stranger Blupower abandoned petrol completely, becoming one of the earliest production cars designed to run exclusively on natural gas.And critics loved it.MoMA displayed it as an example of the future of automotive design.Top Gear named it Car of the Year.Top Gear Magazine named it Family Car of the Year four years in a row.But there was one problem.People hated looking at it.Outside Italy, buyers walked into showrooms, saw the strange double-layered face and went somewhere else.So in 2004 Fiat did something extraordinary.It erased the part of the Multipla that had made it famous.The strange windscreen ledge disappeared.The three-level lighting arrangement vanished.And the facelifted Multipla became a much more conventional-looking car.It still didn't sell.Honda then copied much of the Multipla's six-seat concept for the FR-V.That didn't sell either.Fiat finally stopped production in 2010 after building 343,841 Multiplas — far below what it had originally hoped to sell.But somehow, that still wasn't the end of the story.The Multipla production line went to China.Its unusual flat floor became the basis for early battery-swapping electric taxis.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🔗 LINKS & SUPPORT📚 The book:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH📺 Documentary channel:https://youtube.com/@thatjasonhassett🔔 Subscribe for weekly post-mortems on the cars, companies and engineering decisions that shaped modern motoring.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━#Fiat #FiatMultipla #Multipla #CarDesign #CarHistory #AutomotiveHistory #ItalianCars #WeirdCars #Engineering #TheCarNerd