The original Multipla was a joyous device conceived in 1956 by the incomparable Dante Giacosa (1905–96) to make an estate car out of his new Fiat 600. The rear-engine layout made this quite a trick, but Giacosa came up with a completely new vehicle type with three rows of seats, perfect for many families of modest means, and thereby anticipated the new typology of ‘people carriers’ by more than 20 years.
The new Multipla completely reversed this idea. By the 1990s long three-row ‘van’-type people carriers were commonplace, so the challenge from Paolo Cantarella – at the time managing director of Fiat Auto – was to accommodate six people in comfort in a new short car under 4m (13ft) long.
Designer Roberto Giolito and his team came up with a unique variant – a wide vehicle accommodating three seats in the front and three behind. The two-row layout gave a far more congenial interior for some user groups, as well as a driving experience that was far superior to that of its van-like rivals.
Unfortunately, the intriguing ‘frog face’ front end repelled many people and earned it the ‘Ugliest Car’ award from the BBC’s Top Gear in 1999, though the same programme also voted it ‘Car of the Year’ in 2000. Perhaps the lesson of this episode is that public expectations can be led gently to accept surprising new shapes, as Patrick Le Quément has shown at Renault. Fiat may have surprised the market too much with this daring new shape, but the Multipla is nonetheless destined to be a future automobile classic.
The frog-faced Multipla with 3+3 seating was a clever design invention. Too bad that Fiat did not signal the arrival of the new shape with hints in earlier cars.