Abarth 595C

If you’re looking for a comfortable, refined and capable small car with a bit of a difference, you'd better stop reading now. While the Abarth 595 Competizione is capable, it is neither of the other things and, if I may be so bold, all the better for it.

Some people – people like me and very few of the people I know – are smitten with the idea of a tiny hatchback with a can – actually an entire slab – of whoop-ass rammed into its diminutive dimensions. And there aren’t many around these days, with the Ford Fiesta ST, VW Polo GTI and Hyundai i20 N taking up most of the space. Even then, they’re the Titanic to the 595’s tug boat.

This isn’t a car for everyone and, as you’ll shortly find out, the 595 Competizione is the nichest of niches with the possible exception of the completely mad 695.

Pricing and Features

This version of the Abarth 595 is a step up from the first step on the Abarth ladder. You can buy an Abarth 595 for a tick under $30,000. The Competizione goes for $33,250 before on-road costs.

Before we get into the base specification, bear in mind that the car I drove is nearly ten grand more with matte blue paint for $1600, a body kit ($2450), Premium Pack ($2500), Sport Pack (another $2500) and yellow Brembo brake calipers for $250. The Brembos are standard, the yellow paint isn’t.

The base car starts you off with 17-inch alloys, climate control, central locking, rear parking sensors, automatic halogen headlights, auto wipers, digital dashboard, metallic gear shifter (which gets very hot in the sun), leather steering wheel and seats, and a tyre repair kit.

It’s not a lot of gear, but I would argue quite strongly that at least you can get this stripped-out version without having to wear the cost of options that some brands chuck in.

A 7.0-inch touchscreen running the very busy-looking UConnect software does duty in the centre console and has a number of features including USB Apple CarPlay, Android Auto and DAB+ digital radio. It’s fine but equally, nothing to write home about.

And so we come to the extensive options list. The paint and the calipers are self-explanatory and in the case of the former, colossally expensive for such a small machine. Having said that, your only freebie is white and a bunch of colours are $650. So you’ll be paying for a paint job if white isn’t your thing.

Some people – people like me – are smitten with the idea of a tiny hatchback with an entire slab of whoop-ass rammed into its diminutive dimensions

The Competizione body kit doesn’t really add anything of significance to the car; it’s purely cosmetic. The Sport pack delivers a pair of very firm Sabelt seats, blacked-out wheels and an Alcantara steering wheel.

The Premium Pack adds bi-Xenon headlights (good) and a sunroof with a perforated sliding cover (not so good). Sadly you can’t get the headlights separately.

So, yeah, you can spend more than forty grand on an Abarth 595 Competizione, but you don’t have to. Keep that in mind.

The safety list is a bit skinny, with seven airbags, stability and traction controls, rear parking sensors, tyre pressure monitoring, two ISOFIX points and two top tethers. The car on which it’s based, the 500, was last tested by ANCAP in 2008 and that may as well have been a hundred years ago as the rules have changed so much, so its five-star rating is well and truly expired.

Comfort and Space

The Fiat 500 cabin is impressively sized for its tiny proportions. Front passengers may find the Sabelt seats an acquired taste because they ensure you are set very high and you can’t ratchet them down. The sunroof is no help.

You do have two USB ports, two cup holders and a little slot you can stand your phone in, though. For some reason, the window switches are on the centre console on either side of the shifter and my brain just refused to accept that they were there. Were this my car, I would wear the door armrest down pawing at where my head thinks the window switches should be.

Rather worse is the fact that you can’t adjust the rake of the seats with the door shut. I made this wild claim on Twitter and a bunch of chuckleheads suggested that’s because I have giant meaty hands but I can assure you that my slender fingers could touch the wheel but not get the purchase to turn it. Probably not an issue if it’s just you driving, but if you’re sharing this car with a different person, you might get a bit tired of it.

The extra Alcantara of the extra option packs makes it really nice ... the hot ball of alloy that is the shifter on a summer’s day is both confounding and hilarious

Sticking out of the dashboard is a doof-doof boost gauge, which looks comical and is a bit out of place next to the very useful all-digital instrument pack. The extra Alcantara splashed about the place as a result of the extra option packs makes it really nice, though. The hot ball of alloy that is the shifter on a summer’s day is both confounding and hilarious.

The rear seats are quite competent at their job, allowing folks my size (180cm) to sit in reasonable comfort as long as the passenger in front isn’t a selfish git. If you or any regular passengers are tall, I’d recommend avoiding the sunroof unless you spend a lot of time on dark country roads and need the bi-Xenons.

Being a shopping trolley, the boot is a predictably small 185 litres, but if you put the hard-backed seats down you get 550 litres.

On the Road

Now, some of you will be wondering what the Competizione bit in the name means. First up, you get more power. The less-than-thirty-grand 595 makes do with 107kW and 206Nm of torque, which is pretty good to move just on a tonne about at a decent clip.

It’s fun and engaging as it is, driving the front wheels through a five-speed manual or …shudder…Fiat’s five-speed single-clutch semi-automatic. I shudder because really, it’s not very good and, also, it shudders.

In the Competizione you get a lot more grunt from the 1.4-litre, with 132kW and 250Nm while also claiming a bit of “this engine’s in the Abarth 124 Spyder,  you know,” pub cred. It’s still a five-speed manual and the only problem with that was that I kept looking for sixth.

Abarth claims 6.0L/100km on the combined cycle, which I think might almost be achievable given I drove it as is intended rather than to reach that number, scoring 8.2L/100km. So that’s pretty good going. It does like the good stuff, meaning you have to avoid cheaper 91 RON fuel, which is entirely predictable for a European car.

One of the things I really liked about this car was the gearbox. More to the point, I liked the relationship between gearbox, engine and pedals. The clutch is light and easy to use, the shift short and swift and the pedals lined up very nicely for super-easy heel and toe action.

Being able to put meaningful pressure on the brake pedal while also blatting the throttle with the side of your shoe is one of the great old-school delights of the hot-hatch genre. The big alloy pedals work so well at enabling these heroics.

The 1.4-litre is at its huffing and puffing best in the Abarth. Lots of turbo whistle, an idle that sounds like it has a big lumpy cam and two big bore exhausts poking out the back deliver a surprising amount of aggro. It pulls strongly from rest, with a 0-100km/h time a second better than its cheaper version, at under seven seconds.

And underneath it is an uninspiring-sounding MacPherson strut front/torsion beam rear but with added adaptive suspension. You’ll be hitting the Sport button every time you get in because it’s hard to tell in such a short wheelbase car if it ruins the ride, so you may as well have everything switched on.

Bombing around town and the suburbs in this thing is so much fun. Loud and obnoxious, this car turns heads as well as it should. Few cars are this much fun for everyone involved and the angry Abarth scorpion plastered all over the car at every opportunity is well earned.

Bombing around town and the suburbs in this thing is so much fun. Loud and obnoxious, this car turns heads as well as it should

On the fun bits, you can get it into a proper rhythm and really play around with the car. You won’t be waggling the tail or getting out of shape – again, a short wheelbase isn’t going to deliver much in that way – but you can brake late, turn in, find the grip on the Michelins and power out.

That’s not to say it’s on rails because it absolutely isn’t. The 40-profile tyres don’t have a lot of give in them, so a bumpy road will be a lot of fun if you don’t mind bouncing around and finding the smoothest path through. I know I do and it’s quite exhilarating without you having to be on the wrong side of the law to get there.

The only real gripe I have is that the steering wheel feels a bit big in the Abarth. Making it smaller would provoke other complaints, so the right decision has been made; it’s just not quite right. But that’s okay, because not quite right is this car’s stock-in-trade.

Ownership

Fiat’s three-year/150,000km warranty applies and it will not surprise you to hear I think it should be longer than that, at least five years. Cheeringly, the capped-price servicing regime runs for a lengthy 10 years/150,000km.

From that you may have deduced that servicing is but once a year or every 15,000km and you would be correct. Three years costs $1271 ($423.60 average per visit), five years $2267 ($453.40 average) with a total of $5626 over ten years or $526 per year. It may not be super cheap, but most “cheap” capped-price service deals run out in half that time, Mitsubishi excepted.

VERDICT

The Abarth 595 Competizione is all about fun. The score doesn’t reflect just how much your heart has to be in it to really dig this car. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that because as much as we don’t like to admit it, pretty much every car purchase has some emotional contribution. Even if it’s because you don’t like the shape of the wing mirrors, that’s an emotional decision.

A 595 Comp costs a lot of money for a little car but what it lacks in size and comfort it more than makes up for it by being hilarious to drive. Bonkers Italian cars are a true delight and this one has bonkers by the truckload. In a good way, obviously.

2021 Abarth 595 Competizione specifications