Jay Leno's Garage

Jay's charming vintage Fiats embody the romance and practicality of the brand. He's excited to see what Fiat will bring Stateside since its merger with Chrysler earlier this year.

By Jay Leno
Photographs by John Lamm
Published in the January 2010 issue of Popular Mechanics.

Jay stands between his 1959 Fiat Millecento Sedan (left) and his 1937 Fiat Topolino Coupe.

Fiat is returning to America, and I’m glad. The merger of Fiat and Chrysler will elevate the Italian brand in this country and create some great cars. Fiat is known in Europe for small, fun, fuel-efficient vehicles—cars Chrysler just does not build.

I own two classic Fiats, a 1937 Topolino coupe, with a tiny 569-cc 13.5-hp four-cylinder, and a 1959 Millecento sedan with an 1100-cc 43-hp engine. In America, that sedan would have been the equivalent of a Ford Fairlane or a low-end Galaxie in terms of its stature in the automotive landscape.

If you were a reasonably successful Italian family man in 1959, the Millecento was the car you would buy; it had four doors, a four-speed shifter on the column, a radio and even a two-speed heater. Oh my God, the options go on and on! Fiat has always been an innovative company.

Fiat introduced the Topolino (little mouse) in 1936—and ultimately sold half a million of them. That Topolino was really the first “people’s car.” The Volkswagen Beetle didn’t come out until after the war. The car has brilliant packaging. It’s tiny, yet there’s so much headroom that someone 6 feet tall wearing a top hat could sit inside. It’s one of the few cars in which the generator is bigger than the engine. The radiator is behind the motor so the grille could be made more aerodynamic; you’d never see that on an American car. The Topolino was not powerful. Its top speed was only 53 mph, but it could carry a small family, and I can get close to 50 mpg in my car. Here’s the best part: How many car engines can you remove, bring inside the house, put in your kitchen sink and clean? The Topolino is like a big toy, and it has a sense of style that the VW Beetle never had.

So much about the way a car works has to do with where it’s from. Italian cars, especially Fiats and Alfa Romeos, were built to run in a warm climate. It’s no surprise that the oil passages tend to be small, because the oil used is so thin. But in freezing New England, you’d get into your Fiat or Alfa, turn the key and the car would moan whhrrrrrmmmm, whhrrrrrmmmm. And you’d have to press the throttle halfway down three or four times to warm up the car because you’re forcing heavy, thick oil through tiny passages. This slow-flowing oil tended to starve the bearings, and a lot of engines in these cars seized prematurely. The trick to owning an Italian car, or any older European car, is to start it, wait 2 minutes, or until the gauges move off their stops, then go.

The 1959 Millecento may look bare-bones from inside, but this thrifty sedan was well-equipped for its time and offered hybrid-humbling fuel economy.

In Europe, if you owned a car in the ’50s and ’60s, you were considered a major success. Consequently, you treated your automobile the way you treated your home; it was treasured and taken care of. Whereas in America, at that time, we could buy used cars that actually ran for about 50 bucks. Our cars tended to be a little overbuilt and a lot more durable. We didn’t have a “liter tax” on engine size, and we didn’t have high gas prices. Our cars had big, heavy, slow-revving (really slow-revving) engines that would last forever—or at least 100,000 miles.