All Kind Automotive

As its name implies, the heavily modified Italian hatchback gains a new layout with a mid-mounted engine and rear-wheel drive. Of course, such a radical change is not an easy task with the company having to re-engineer the entire vehicle.

Among other changes, the rear seats of the production model were dropped to create space for the engine while there’s also a new rear suspension set-up and a high-performance braking system with 335mm front- and 305mm rear- discs coupled with four-piston calipers.

According to the Dutch press release, the 500 was gutted and modified with a roll cage, new fuel tank, and an integrated limiter to ensure the right speed. Check out the stunt and interviews in the video below.

However, there was one problem: the original car's 18.0-liter engine was considered rather small by Eldridge, who decided to replace it with a massive airplane powerplant (you can read a similar story here). He opted for a liquid-cooled Fiat-built 21.7-liter inline six-cylinder unit (type A-12 Bis) that developed 320 horsepower at 1,800 rpm after various upgrades such as the fitting of four valves and four spark plugs on each cylinder.

The story goes that in order to accommodate the long and heavy engine, Eldridge lengthened the SB4's chassis using parts from a London bus. The car was chain-driven and had brakes only at the rear, which made it a handful for even the most experienced of drivers. Interestingly, experts fail to understand even today the mechanism that allowed the car to reverse, since there is no trace of it left.

It was the decade that brought us The French Connection, Gone in 60 Seconds and Smokey and the Bandit. It also brought us a relatively unknown (well, to my –ahem- clearly sophisticated tastes) French film called Le Casse (The Burglars).

Oh sure, Bullitt had Steve McQueen in a Mustang and Goldfinger had Sean Connery in a DB5, but you ain’t ever seen a film so brazen to put Omar Sharif behind the wheel of...an Opel Rekord. Well, he is the villain. Surely our hero, Jean-Paul Belmondo, will get to drive something a bit smarter.

The Twinair unit the first of a new family of two-cylinder engines that will be used on numerous A- and B-segment cars of the Fiat Group. This particular version produces 85HP propelling the 500 hatch from zero to 100km/h (62mph) in 11 seconds and returning a combined fuel consumption of 4.1 lt/100km (57.4mpg US) with C02 emissions of just 95g/km. Read more about the new Fiat 500s in our previous post here.

The two cars collided head on at an average speed of 56 km/h (around 35mph). According to ADAC, whereas the driver and passengers of the Audi Q7 would have made it out of the crash with minor and non life-threatening injuries, the risk of serious injuries in the Fiat 500 was surprisingly high for both front and rear passengers. However despite what you may think, ADAC’s prime objective wasn’t to show that a large SUV is safer than a minicar but to point out that automakers should take smaller sized vehicles into consideration when they design a large size model. –Video after the jump