New Fiat Panda confirmed as 2CV’s electric sister car – and a new 500e could follow

The new Fiat Panda city car will join Citroën’s 2CV on Stellantis’s new e-car platform, Fiat’s Arnaud Belloni has confirmed. 

“We are preparing a small car which will be based on the 2CV platform and it's going to be ‘wow’!” said the recently appointed CEO of the Fiat brand. “It’s a very different approach, not a neo-retro approach. We will present it next year, probably.”

That means the new Panda – referred to as Pandina in Italy – will take its design direction from the Grande Panda, with its pixellated lightbar, boxy silhouette and chunky surfaces. It’ll be pure electric, the first baby Panda to be zero emissions.

Citroën’s newly unveiled 2CV measures just over 3.6m long, the same size as today’s Panda. Stellantis is engineering flexibility into all its platforms, including the new e-car architecture, so it will be able to support a taller vehicle that feels spacious for four people. 

Expect the two car’s key dimensions, such as the wheelbase, to be the same to drive down costs, and a common battery and electric motor. Citroën is targeting a price of 15,000 Euros (£12.7k) for the 2CV, and the Fiat should cost much the same, said Belloni. 

Two e-car models have now been confirmed, both set for assembly in the Pomigliano d’Arco factory in Italy, where the combustion Panda is currently assembled. But the project is certain to sire more models to boost economies of scale – potentially including Fiat’s 500e successor. “The next generation of the Cinquecento could be based on e-car,” he told Auto Express. 

And Leapmotor is also part of the e-car project, Stellantis chief tech officer Ned Curic told Auto Express. A joint R&D team is working at Mirafiori, with Leapmotor engineers assisting with software and how to speed up the programme to deliver on an architecture that Curic vows originated in Stellantis. “We have learned how to [develop city] cars in two years. And having them with us on this platform is also very rewarding in that sense because you know we’re using the same tools, the same processes, and then we use the same design-to-manufacturing. And learnings from how they think about electrical architecture and the software have been very very rewarding for us.”

The upshot is that the replacement for the Leapmotor T03 electric city car will likely be based on e-car. If so, it could be industrialised in Stellantis’ European factory network to boost scale and margins. Today’s T03 was briefly assembled in Poland, when local incentives were favourable. 

Fiat is using its heritage as a small car brand to deliver affordable electric motoring. Citroen’s two-seat Ami EV – in effect a quadricycle with a 5kWh battery and eight horsepower – has spawned the Fiat-badged Topolino, and now the Italians have stretched it to create the Multiplina. The Ami might not have cracked the UK market despite its cuteness, yet Fiat has retailed 40,000 in two years, the boss revealed. 

The Panda will be a completely different animal, though. “It will be a normal car, not L7 or an L6,” said Belloni, referring to the two regulatory categories for heavy and light duty quadricycles. 

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