American golf carts are mostly not used for golf, and Fiat has decided that is a market. The company has begun selling the Topolino, a two-seat electric micro car, through selected United States dealers, aimed at the roughly 2.3 million people who drive carts around resorts, gated neighbourhoods and coastal towns. Bloomberg puts the value of that market at about $1 billion.
The specification is modest, deliberately. A 5.4kWh battery gives up to 46 miles of range and takes about five hours to charge on a normal outlet, and the car is 8 feet 3 inches long and weighs 1 073lb. It leaves the factory capped at 19mph, which keeps it off public roads. A dealer-installed conversion kit due later this year lifts the top speed to 25mph and adds a rear camera, a pedestrian alert and a proper vehicle identification number, which turns it into a federally regulated low-speed vehicle, legal on roads posted at 35mph or less. Until that arrives, buyers are mostly limited to private property.
The dealers ran out first
Fiat shipped about 300 units to the United States ahead of an official launch tentatively set for October, brand chief executive Olivier François telling Bloomberg that requests from American dealerships persuaded him to make it available early. They went quickly. Alfa Romeo Fiat of Daytona in Florida sold its first six immediately, a Minnesota dealer sold five before they reached the lot, and a Michigan dealership has sold 10 of its 14 and ordered another nine.
The buyers are not commuters. The list price is $13,995 before the destination fee, which puts it under the luxury carts it is competing with, and dealers describe the buyers as affluent people treating it as a second or third vehicle. The promotional tour has been routed accordingly, through the Hamptons, Montauk and Coral Gables.
What it does not have
It has seatbelts. It does not have airbags or a crumple zone, and as a low-speed vehicle in the United States and an L-category vehicle in Europe it is not put through standard crash tests. Michelangelo-Santo Gulino, an engineering professor at the University of Florence who co-authored a recent study on micro car safety, told Bloomberg that in an impact where the difference in mass is very high, the light vehicle will be disadvantaged. There is no air conditioning either.
Fiat has run this play before. Stellantis built a dominant position in European quadricycles, the small four-wheeled vehicles the Topolino belongs to, after launching the battery-powered Ami in 2020 and overtaking Ligier and Aixam, the French makers that had held the market for decades. France and Italy are the two biggest markets on the continent. The Topolino itself was unveiled in 2023 and takes its look from the Fiat 500 Nuova of the late 1950s, another car just under three metres long that got there first.
