A few years ago, Fiat had a problem with one of its big image-makers. The electric Fiat 500e city car simply wasn’t selling well enough for the scale of its production line to make sense. Rather than allocate some space in the Mirafiori plant to another model, Fiat set about the arduous task of turning an electric car into a hybrid. The development window was small, but Fiat seems to be pulling it off, with pre-production examples of the 500 Hybrid already being built.
If that wasn’t interesting enough, among the staged low-resolution photos of a pre-production 500 Hybrid released by Fiat sits a partially camouflaged dashboard shot proudly displaying a shifter with a six-speed H-pattern on a cue ball knob. Yep, it’s a hybrid with a manual transmission, a sensible city car with gears you can row yourself.
Needless to say, hybrid cars with manual transmissions are rare. Outside of a handful of Hondas (including the original Insight and the CR-Z), there aren’t many around. However, this makes me wonder what Fiat means by “hybrid.” See, Honda’s stick-shift hybrids used the old Integrated Motor Assist system, which was a parallel hybrid system. This means that the engine couldn’t purely act as a generator while the motor alone drove the wheels, but rather, the motor provides regenerative braking and drives the car with the gasoline engine, reducing load on the engine and allowing for a smaller combustion engine than would be needed in a non-hybrid setup.
In contrast, the series-parallel hybrids we’re used to today can all drive the wheels on electric power alone, and some don’t even require a transmission at all, but the logistics of a series-parallel system with a manual transmission are complicated to say the least. Electric motors don’t require multi-speed transmissions, but shutting off and starting up a combustion engine with a clutch engaged while a vehicle’s in motion can be, well, dangerous without at least a freewheel mechanism on the flywheel. At the same time, manually shifting a gearbox with an electric motor engaged sounds like it could be a tricky proposition for rev-matching, and potentially an invitation to break stuff with enough output.
However, there’s a good chance Fiat’s using the hybrid moniker a bit generously. See, Stellantis already has a suitable powertrain, a one-liter three-cylinder engine with a 48-volt mild hybrid system, all mated to a manual gearbox. It was used in the old 500 and is used in the Fiat Panda, and it kicks out a modest 70 horsepower. Is that the powertrain in this new 500 Hybrid? Fiat won’t say one way or another yet, but it’s plausible that an already homologated powertrain could’ve shortened lead times, albeit while leading to its own challenges.
Regardless of what’s under the hood, just think about what goes into taking an electric car and turning it into a combustion-powered one. It requires carving out gallons of space for a fuel tank and exhaust system, ensuring a combustion powertrain fits under the hood without causing any issues in crash tests, changing spring and damping rates to deal with the change in weight, snaking a filler neck up into the quarter-panel, running fuel lines up and down the car, punching out enough of the frontal area for adequate cooling, packaging larger heat exchangers, the list just goes on. In this case, it also requires finding room in the dashboard for a shifter mechanism, designing a new pedal box with a clutch pedal that won’t cause issues in crash testing, running additional hydraulics through the firewall, and getting everything to play nice with the body electrical system.
It’s a bear of a task, and the fact that Fiat seems to be pulling it off is fascinating. Of course, there’s still some tweaking to be done and processes to nail down before production kicks off in the fourth quarter of this year, but pre-production models already rolling down the line at Mirafiori is a good start.
Top graphic credit: Fiat
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