Fiat’s battery-electric hot rod tries to emulate Abarth’s signature exhaust note.
- The 2023 Fiat 500 Abarth trucks along with a battery-electric version based on the 500e.
- The compact Fiat 500e Abarth will make 155 hp and 173 lb-ft of torque from a single electric motor.
- Feeding that motor is a 42-kWh battery pack that should carry this Fiat 500e Abarth about 200 miles, according to the WLPT test.
Rejoice scorpion fans! There’s hope for Fiat’s legendary Abarth performance brand in the electric age as the Italian automaker rolls out an Abarth variant of its 500e. The transition from the screaming turbocharged 1.4-liter I4 to the battery-electric platform should leave its iconic noise by the wayside, but Fiat will deploy a sound generator to give this machine some snarl. The Abarth variant of the 500e also delivers less power than its internal-combustion cousin but is reportedly quicker in the real world.
Okay, so it’s not more powerful than its out-of-production Abarth predecessor, but the single-motor 500e Abarth makes 155 hp and 173 lb-ft of torque. Feeding that electric motor is a 42-kWh battery pack, which is effectively the same as the current long-range battery pack that powers 500e models abroad.
That means a fully charged Abarth 500e will travel about 199 miles, based on the WLPT cycle. If this were to head stateside, that range would drop with the EPA test cycle. All in, Fiat says this 500e Abarth can sprint to 62 mph in seven seconds. That’s considerably slower than, say, a Tesla Model S Plaid, but is about in line with what Car and Driver saw with the gasoline-burning 500 Abarth.
While it won’t have its signature exhaust note, the Fiat 500e Abarth will still be hard to mistake for the pedestrian 500e. Fiat slapped an Abarth script on the 500e’s nose and emblazoned it across both door bottoms. Combine that with the sound generator, and your neighbors will know that you dropped the extra bucks for the higher-performance Fiat EV. It isn’t clear if that sound generator is a speaker or something like the Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust found on Dodge’s EV concept, but the automaker says you can turn it off if you want.
Fiat says members of the Abarth community can place an order for one today, and the brand’s website says you can expect these to hit certain streets in February of 2023. For now, the US is not expected to receive the 500e, as Fiat pulled the internal-combustion 500 from this market in 2019. However, parent company Stellantis needs battery-electric vehicles in the US, and this hopped-up EV could be a good fit.
Wesley Wren Wesley Wren has spent his entire life around cars, whether it’s dressing up as his father’s 1954 Ford for Halloween as a child, repairing cars in college or collecting frustrating pieces of history—and most things in between.
Keyword: 2023 Fiat 500e Abarth Is Amplified with a Sound Generator