From the 2011 New York Auto Show, Cars.com's Kelsey Mays takes a look at the 2012 Fiat 500C.
Transcript
<v Announcer>Cars.com auto reviews. Hi, I'm Kelsey Mays for cars.com. We're at the New York Auto Show, checking out the Fiat 500c. This is a new model for 2012, and it joins the 500 hard top. C as you can see, stands for Cabrio.
This is the convertible version. We're gonna take you through the differences between this and its hard top sibling. Now, like the original 500 convertible, this one's got a canvas top here. It retracts any of infinite positions. You can stop it anywhere along here as you want. And it does this all the way up to 60 miles an hour, which is kind of nice. It goes back there, and if you press this button one more time, you'll see that the canvas roof retracts all the way into this kind of accordion position here with the glass rear window in there. So what happens if you need to get some trunk access? Well, first of all, it's not going to let you open the trunk until this comes back up. And the reason for that, Fiat tells us, is to allow the trunk to open, not to clear up any more space per se, in this trunk area, which remains totally like it is now, whether the top is up or folded back. Total space in here is only about five and a half cubic feet, much smaller than the nearly 10 cubic feet in the 500 hard top. With all of the framework above your head, it's more of a giant sunroof experience than a true convertible one. The roof moving happens with these buttons up here. You just press them once and you can put your hands back on the wheel to drive, which is nice. Typical of a convertible, when the top is up or partially up the rear window is pretty small, so there's not as much visibility straight out the back versus the 500 hardtop. But the C pillars don't feel especially big like they do in some convertibles. This isn't any more difficult to see out of in your blind spot than in the hard top. You put the top all the way down and it does get pretty difficult to see 'cause you've got all of that squashed infrastructure behind you. Probably a reason why Fiat chose to include rear sonar parking sensors standard in all convertible variants. In the 500 hard top, that feature is optional. With its 1.4. liter four cylinder engine, expect the 500c to get similar low thirties gas mileage as the 500 hard top when it goes on sale late this spring. <v Announcer>For more car related news, go to cars.com. For our blog, kickingtires.net.
