ABARTH 500E

Our electric hot hatch captures the zeitgeist in both good ways and bad

- KRIS CULMER

WHY WE'RE RUNNING IT This high-vis EV could be the future of hot hatches. Should we be excited?

When I first drove an Abarth 595, years ago now, on a hilly handling circuit, I flippantly described it as a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel and a rocket stuck on the back. Neglecting to mention a driving seat that felt like a toddler's high chair and a gearlever positioning that made shifting feel like stirring my dinner around a saucepan. I wasn't a fan, basically.

Its electric successor, the Abarth 500e, turned out to be not dissimilar when I took it to the South Downs one night recently. Except now the rocket is of the Soyuz variety and the gearlever has been replaced by a storage tray, quite necessarily rubberised. This new, heated-up Fiat 500 feels flatter and heavier in the way that it rides ruined asphalt and shifts its mass about, but no less loco-actually, even more so. The short of it is that rather than feeling in control, revelling in pinging from corner to corner, I felt like I was clinging on for dear life. Not fun. One lap of my usual playground and I called it quits. And no, I don't think all EVs aren't fun - just most of them. I absolutely loved touring rural Scotland in an MG Cyberster.