Abarth cars for sale
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Italy · est. 1949 · The scorpion — Fiats with fangs.
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Overview
Abarth is Stellantis’s hot-small-car brand: take a Fiat, add boost, noise and suspension, and charge accordingly. The 595 and 695 are the modern products, and their appeal is entirely disproportionate to their size — a 695 is loud, stiff, twitchy and completely uninterested in being sensible.
The scorpion badge is Carlo Abarth’s star sign.
History
Carlo Abarth, an Italo-Austrian engineer, founded Abarth & C. on 31 March 1949 in Bologna, using assets from the collapsed Cisitalia racing team. The early business was performance parts — inlet manifolds and, above all, exhaust systems — for Fiat, Lancia, Cisitalia and Simca. Abarth exhausts were a genuine cultural object in post-war Italy.
Racing built the name, mostly in small-capacity classes from 850cc to 2000cc; Tazio Nuvolari won his final race in an Abarth 204A in 1950. Carlo sold to Fiat on 31 July 1971 and the badge became Fiat’s competition department. It was re-established as its own unit on 1 February 2007 with the Grande Punto Abarth.
Buying a used Abarth
These are small cars with big turbochargers and a hard life. Look for service history, evidence the turbo has been allowed to cool rather than switched off hot, and check the clutch on manual cars.
The ride is genuinely firm and the 695 is uncompromising — take a long test drive on roads you actually use before committing, because the thing that makes it charming for ten minutes is the same thing that makes it tiring for two hours.