Styling
The
Fiat 500e Convertible on which the Abarth version is based is a good-looking car, so the 'Scorpion' treatment hardly hurts it. Like its
hatchback relation, the Abarth 500e Convertible sports beefier bumpers and wheel arches, sits on a striking set of 18-inch alloy wheels, and bears big, chunky-lettered 'Abarth' legends at both ends of the car, as well as those side emblems of the scorpion bisected by a lightning bolt. As a Convertible model, the only real difference from the hatch is that this car has the full-length folding roof, which opens with the first press of the button (up near the interior mirror) all the way back behind the rear seats - kind of like a full-length sunroof - and then, with a secondary press of the button from there, concertinas down the last bit of the top, including the small spoiler and the glass rear screen, to sit everything above the bootlid. In all three roof settings, the Abarth looks good from the kerb, and there are now just four colours available to it, although they're all nice, strong shades to make the most of the 500e's aesthetic: Antidote White and Venom Black are both solid finishes; and signature Acid Green (although we reckon it's more yellow than green) and Adrenaline Red are classified as pastels. Only the white is free; the other three are all £650 apiece.
Interior
Again, the regular 500e has a quality cabin, so embellishing that with a couple of big, comfy Abarth sports seats and then trimming those plus the dashboard and the steering wheel - complete with a correct and sporty 12 o'clock marker - only makes things better. The Abarth might not have the most advanced digital cluster nor infotainment system going, but by the same score neither of them are offensively off-the-pace, so overall the 500e Convertible's cabin gets the thumbs up.
Practicality
In many ways, the Abarth 500e Convertible is a better piece of packaging than the three-door
electric MINI, because it's slightly more than 200mm shorter in both overall length and wheelbase, yet the rear seats don't look markedly less capacious than its similarly overtly fashion-conscious British rival. This newer 500 body also allows for a roomier and better-built interior than the one in the old, long-serving,
ICE-powered previous generation, so considering its exterior size the Abarth 500e is not without merit in terms of practicality.
That said, if you feel like we're damning the Abarth 500e Convertible with the faintest of faint praise, you might be right. No adult is going to thank you for making them sit in the rear of the car for any great length of time, even if it's a nice day and you can at least open the roof to enlarge the headroom to the stratosphere - because while there might be enough space for taller people's heads in such circumstances, you can do precious little about the mighty restricted kneeroom, nor the lack of foot space underneath those bulkier front buckets. Similarly, the boot is minuscule at 185 litres; pop the EV's charging cable and a cricket kit bag in the back, and it's pretty much full to bursting. A neat feature does at least see the roof, if it's in its most-retracted position when you touch the boot-opening solenoid, automatically lift up to the higher open position so the bootlid doesn't foul the folded soft-top, but it can't hide the fact this is (understandably) one of the smallest cargo areas by volume in the automotive world.
Beyond that, in-cabin stowage is merely adequate. There are door pockets, of a fashion, and a central stowage cubby between the seats, while the integration of the wireless charging pad for smartphones is neatly done in the dashboard. But there's simply not a lot of room in the confines of the Abarth's cabin to play with and Abarth can't magic capacity out of nothing, Tardis-like, so while we accept the concession that such a small car isn't going to swallow tonnes of people and clobber, the 500e doesn't score highly for practicality in the final reckoning.
Performance
To give the Abarth the added pep that the Scorpion badge deserves, the go-faster arm of Fiat removes the 87kW e-motor you'd find in the standard 500e Convertible and replaces it with a more muscular 113.7kW option. This, as on so many affordable EVs, drives the front wheels through a single-speed reduction gear, with outputs rising from a reasonable 118hp/220Nm on the source-material car to 155hp and 235Nm here. This trims fully two seconds from the 0-62mph time, the Abarth soft-top capable of the run in seven seconds precisely, while a nominal 3mph is added to the largely irrelevant top speed.
In practice, this power enhancement works well. The Abarth only weighs around 1,400kg, so 155hp is more than enough to make it feel lively. Nevertheless, if we weren't trying to append the epithet 'hot' to it because it's an EV, and we desperately need more EV hot hatches as the ICE ones slowly die a death, we'd only really be inclined to say this feels 'warm'. It's not brutally quick, as it only has 10Nm over the Fiat on which it is based, and so while it feels nice and punchy for scooting around up to 50mph, the power soon dies away as you get to 62mph so the Abarth never truly feels out-and-out rapid.
There's also the noise. Abarth seems to have got a better hang of things in this regard with its larger and fabulous
600e model, because the Scorpion External Sound on the 500e is something about which we remain to be convinced. First of all, even accessing the tick-box to switch this system on and off is a multi-press faff in the instrument-cluster screen in front of the driver, and furthermore it becomes inaccessible as soon as the car is rolling.
With SES engaged, at a standstill the large speaker mounted underneath the rear of the 500e broadcasts a fairly passable impression of the old 1.4-litre turbo unit you'd find in the older ICE Abarths, including the
last mad little yellow two-seater based on a Fiat 500 this company made which we happened to drive. And then, as speeds rise, there's the noise of the same engine building revs. Both are reasonable recordings of the old Abarths' signature voice, but the problem is that the lack of any gearchanges (either physical, for obvious reasons in an EV, or replicated by software hacks) just makes the car sound like you've forgotten to shift up at about 56mph onwards, while the background burble of the idling track never goes away; it just mixes with the revving portion of the synthetics. And it all adds up to something you'll try once or twice, then switch off never to use again.
But fake-turboery is not why we've got a major gripe with the Abarth 500e Convertible. No, it's the sheer lack of usability. Sadly, Abarth seems to have got caught in that strange hinterland between fitting a bigger battery to an EV to give it more legs, particularly useful if you're also equipping a more potent, less efficient e-motor at the same time (as here), and then the twin considerations of packaging constraints and keeping the overall vehicle weight down, so that 155hp feels plenty instead of a paucity.
All very noble. Yet, officially speaking, the Abarth 500e loses fully 42 miles of range compared to its Fiat sister (157 plays 199 miles) just to take that two seconds off the 0-62mph sprint. And when our test car showed up with 78 per cent battery charge, the onboard trip computer reading was even more alarming: theoretically, from that point, only a maximum of 98 miles was on offer.
Look, we're not expecting something with a 42kWh battery to do 10,000 miles in a single hit. We get that. And the minimal range might be OK, if the Abarth was an absolute riot of straight-line acceleration and handling nous. But it's not. On the former score, it's only decently swift, nothing more. And worse still, you can't actually enjoy the small bit of extra pace the Abarth has over the Fiat anyway, because the minute you start digging into the throttle on your favourite backroads, the indicated range starts tumbling to ever-more meagre figures. So you can't really thrash it for prolonged periods out in the countryside. It's less efficient in town than the Fiat. Therefore, what's it for?
Who's it for? It's so severely compromised on its range that it reminds us of another great-looking EV which never quite hit the spot with buyers - namely, the
Honda e.
Two small details in its defence to finish this section, then. As the battery is so tiny, even a 10-95 per cent charge on a DC public unit (it was late at night with no other EVs around so we weren't rudely hogging it for that final 15 per cent) only cost £27.77 at a chunky 87p/kWh, although that charge did take fully 50 minutes (it was about 35 minutes to 80 per cent, for reference). And two, the Abarth managed a commendable 3.6 miles/kWh during 88 miles on test, although that may have been because we were suffering such range anxiety that we were predominantly driving the 500e Convertible in a cautious manner to preserve what little mileage we had at our disposal. Thus proving that bestowing the extra power on the car yet saddling it with the same-sized battery rather defeats the Abarth's main point.
Ride & Handling
It's better news in this section, as the Abarth variant rides almost as well as the Fiat 500e - one of our favourite urban EV runarounds for its rolling refinement - and the handling is pretty joyous. The steering on the Abarth 500e Convertible is surprisingly weighty and informative, and the tougher suspension plus bigger, grippier tyres do allow it to maintain as much of its hard-won pace through corners as it possibly can. This does make it a (sort of) hoot to drive, if only it weren't for the nervousness you've got about depleting the battery too quickly when you're enjoying the chassis sparkle. Honestly, this car would be
massively improved simply by having a 50- or 55kWh unit; it'd allow you to enjoy all the good work Abarth has done elsewhere with this package, without making the 500e significantly heavier nor more expensive. Surely?
Value
All the grousing above about the battery would perhaps be tolerable if the Abarth was a spectacular bargain. But it's not. In this Convertible specification, without one of the three fancier paint colours on it, the 500e is only 15 quid shy of 34 grand. That's just bonkers in a world where we now have things like the majestic
Renault 5 E-Tech, which might not be a 'performance' model but which drives every bit as well as the Abarth, looks better on the outside, is far more practical and nicely appointed within, and which is a stonking £6,990 cheaper to boot. Or even, if you need more EV pace than either of these two possess, the 435hp
MG 4 XPower isn't a huge financial stretch from the 500e. Four-hundred and thirty-five horsepower, mind.
Granted, there's some nice kit as standard on the Abarth and it looks great inside and out, it really does - in fact, it has bags of character. But that near-£34,000 price tag just plays on your mind constantly, in light of what you're eventually getting. Not only are there better-value EVs available at this sort of level these days, it's even more than the last convertible Abarth we drove, the fantastic
124 Spider. Yes, yes; inflation and all means the 124 would be a lot more today than the £32,000 it was eight years ago, but it's just another point that goes against the 500e Convertible in your brain, ultimately.
Verdict
We feel awful marking the Abarth 500e Convertible down to just two-and-a-half out of five, but in all honesty we couldn't possibly recommend it to anyone because it's just so compromised in terms of its range. About the only people we think it would be perfect for in various British territories would be car enthusiasts who live in Jersey, and as you can see that's a mighty limited market to be considering. You can't even reasonably recommend it as a 'second' car, because anyone using it as a predominantly urban runaround doesn't need the extra dynamic and performance capabilities of the Abarth; they'd be better off with the Fiat 500e instead.
In essence, Abarth's 500e Convertible looks cracking inside and out, goes reasonably well, handles smartly, and offers something completely unattainable anywhere else at this sort of price level. But that's the point, isn't it? It's not like the soft-top Scorpion-badged 500e is cheap. It's
34 grand. For a car that'll be, realistically, only capable of double-digit range without needing another 30-minute charge at a public DC unit. If you want a really good Italian electric convertible that's stylish and charming to drive, go for the cheaper and considerably longer-legged regular Fiat version of this very car. If you want a super-sharp Abarth EV that you can drive hard without the worry it'll run out of juice in about 75 miles, try out the brilliant, far more practical and not much more expensive 600e. But this 155hp 500e? We want to love it. We so do. But we can't. As likeable as the Abarth soft-top is, the tiny battery and potent e-motors guzzling at its reserves so greedily, plus the inflated expense of the thing relative to what you get, means it's not really any use at all.
