New Fiat GigaPanda and Fastback to be revealed at 2026 Paris Motor Show

The all-new Fiat ‘GigaPanda’ and Fastback will be revealed at the 2026 Paris Motor Show in October, more than two years after concept versions of the fresh and thoroughly funky family SUVs were presented. 

The pair will be shown alongside the Italian brand’s latest concept, which we suspect will preview the new city-sized Fiat Pandina that Auto Express learned is due to arrive in 2027 and will be packing petrol power. 

Fiat is going to be competing for the spotlight with the other brands in the Stellantis family at the show. Peugeot says it is looking to deliver a “powerful and emotional statement”, hopefully by offering our best look yet at the next Peugeot 208, while Citroen is bringing along its own mysterious concept “packed with personality”. The new Lancia Gamma, a rival for the Ford Capri SUV, is going to be in attendance as well. 

By Fiat’s standards, launching two family SUVs is a big deal. The car we know as GigaPanda - which may well not use that name on the production version - might even be offered with seven seats. 

Meanwhile, the Fastback will fill the gap left by the Tipo, fleetingly sold in the UK as a budget hatchback to challenge the Ford Focus. But the saloon variant is the big ticket item for Fiat: badged as Egea, it’s a strong seller in Algeria and Turkey, where it’s assembled; there’s also a coupé-SUV called the Fastback in Brazil. The new model is charged with replacing all of these Fiats in one fell swoop and we are expecting it to come here, too. 

“Two new cars are coming that will complete Fiat’s resurgence,” head of Europe Gaetano Thorel exclusively told Auto Express at the brand’s Centro Stile design centre last year. 

The cars will underpin Fiat’s bid to transform from local player to global force. The once-mighty small car brand has become a minnow in the UK, with the baby Panda no longer manufactured in right-hand drive and only the 500e city car and 600 mild hybrid and electric SUV in showrooms, alongside their sporty Abarth offshoots. 

However, reinforcements are finally on the way. Fiat engineers have overhauled the 500’s electric platform to accommodate a lightly electrified petrol engine and the show-stopping Grande Panda, the reigning Auto Express Supermini of the Year, is now on sale and available from our Buy A Car service from less than £18,000. “Our dealers have had to cross the desert!” continued the colourful Thorel. “But now they know the desert is over.”

The Grande Panda’s retromodernist design will demonstrate its versatility and dictate the look of the new GigaPanda and Fastback, which were previewed by the 2024 concept cars.

“When we developed Grande Panda, we [created] a series of vehicles in a kind of ‘Lego’ system, where we’ll build different vehicles in different sizes that actually use a lot of common components to really reduce their cost,” Fiat head of design François Leboine told Auto Express at the Centro Stile. 

The Grande Panda’s silhouette, front and rear lamp outlines, blocky, rectangular panels and Panda script capture the spirit of the eighties original, while the short overhangs, complex light patterns and vibrant colours bring modernity. Throw in the design team’s cheesy but instructive buzzphrases – to make cars ‘practicool’ and put the fun into functionality – and you have the recipe shaping the GigaPanda and Fastback. 

The latter has an angular tail crowned with a diagonally slanted rear screen that mimics the windscreen’s rake, a key relationship in the Grande Panda’s design too, according to Leboine. Overall, the Fastback’s form resembles the Polestar 2’s, a high-riding notchback. 

The smart money is on Turkish saloon-fans being disappointed as the Agea morphs into a crossover with a tailgate, but delivers more global appeal. “Today Egea is a saloon. But I think you can have the consumer evolve,” hinted Thorel.

Under the skin, the new Fiats will use the Stellantis group’s low-cost architecture, introduced on the Citroen C3 and underpinning the Grande Panda. “We will use the ‘smart car’ platform to propose and produce new vehicles that will be targeting different regions in the world and different customers, sometimes replacing [existing] products or even coming with new products,” said Leboine.

That means the platform’s full mix of powertrains and EV batteries is on the shelf for the future Fiat family. 

Citroen has introduced a range-topping 54kWh battery for the e-C3 Aircross, which is good for nearly 250 miles on a single charge. It sits alongside the 44kWh pack, good for 188 miles. Expect the GigaPanda to offer both batteries and similar ranges.

“We called it GigaPanda to let people understand it’s much bigger than Grande Panda, though they’re rooted in the same design,” said the European boss. “Fiat’s playground is urban mobility. That to me means from 2.5 metres [the Topolino version of the Citroen Ami] to four-point-something metres.”

Fiat previewed the GigaPanda concept with a striking purple SUV, again with blocky sections, pixel lights and body detailing inspired by the old Lingotto factory’s rows of square windows. The long wheelbase frees up space for larger families, though the kicked-up windowline will need extending – perhaps in keeping with the blue Panda Camper XXL concept’s sideglass – to give passengers in the third row a view out.   

“I cannot say we’ll do it [exactly] like this,” Leboine told Auto Express in Turin. “But we’ve worked on this vehicle family and they are ready. The [Grande] Panda [concept] was a bit exaggerated but all the cues were there. That’s more or less what will happen [with GigaPanda].” 

Fiat has learned its lesson from originally offering the 500 only as a pure EV. So the mild-hybrid 1.2-litre turbo petrol will be fitted, along with a pure-petrol (as well as options running on ethanol, a popular fuel in Brazil).

The two cars should be on the market by the end of 2026, with a pick-up set to join the line-up the following year, along with the little Pandina. 

“We have a responsibility to get Fiat back to where it belongs in Europe,” said Thorel. “We want to be a protagonist, which means having a market coverage of at least 50 per cent.” And what is Fiat’s market coverage today, we asked? “Without Grande Panda? I can’t tell you, because otherwise you’d ask: ‘How have you survived?’!”

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