The most fun car at the Paris Motor Show this fall wasn’t a hypercar. It was a little orange box from Fiat. The Multiplina is an electric four-seater just over three meters long, styled after the 1956 Fiat 600 Multipla, with a cream roof, toy wheel covers and a roll-back fabric sunroof. It’s only a concept for now, but it asks a question the EV world keeps dodging: how small can a real family car get?
A 1956 trick, rebuilt for batteries
The original Fiat 600 Multipla was a packaging miracle. Fiat pushed the driver almost onto the front axle, put the engine in the back and fit six seats into a body about 3.5 meters long. It looked like a loaf of bread with a grin, and Italian families and taxi drivers loved it for years.
The Multiplina plays the same game with an electric drivetrain. The windshield stands almost upright, the nose is barely there and the wheels sit right at the corners, so nearly all of the car’s length goes to the cabin. Even the old car’s chrome moustache is back, redrawn as a row of soft ribs across the hood.
The numbers so far
Put it next to its siblings and the trick gets obvious. The Multiplina is half a meter longer than the two-seat Topolino and the Microlino, and that extra half meter buys a whole second row. It’s still about 60 centimeters shorter than a Fiat 500e, and close to two meters shorter than a Model Y.
The fun is in the details
Walk around it and the jokes keep coming. Orange and cream wheel covers that look borrowed from a 1950s toy. Tiny rectangular headlights. Tall oval taillights at each rear corner, a ribbed tailgate, and a fabric sunroof you roll back by hand. Inside, the seats are striped like a beach chair.
What a heavy quadricycle means
Fiat built the Multiplina on an L7e heavy quadricycle platform, the European class that sits between tiny city runabouts and regular cars. Under EU rules a passenger L7e can weigh up to 450 kg without its battery, make no more than 15 kW of power and reach 90 km/h, about 56 mph. That is enough for city traffic and the ring road, and the lighter rules help keep the price down. Fiat hasn’t said where the Multiplina will land inside those limits.
For American readers, that’s the catch. The US has no matching class. Small electric cars here either meet the full federal safety standards, like any regular car, or count as low-speed vehicles capped at 25 mph. That’s the route Fiat took when it brought the two-seat Topolino to the US. Fiat hasn’t said anything about bringing the Multiplina here, and for now it’s a concept with no production plan announced.
Watch it zip around
Fiat’s film sends the Multiplina down the Italian coast, through cobbled lanes and around hairpins, and at one point parks it next to a lemon the size of a car. One honest note: Fiat says some of the product images in the film were partly made with AI, so treat the scenery as a daydream. The car itself was very real on the stand in Paris.
Small cars should be fun again
Most new EVs have settled into one shape: a tall crossover with squinting headlights and a serious face, usually in white, black or grey. They’re good cars. They just don’t make anyone smile in a parking lot. Going electric is a rare chance to change that, because without a big engine to package around, a city car can be small, light and built around the people inside.
The Multiplina joins a growing gang of little EVs with real personality, from the Topolino XS concept to Renault’s surf buggy. Our wish is simple: build it, Fiat, and keep this exact orange. We’ll add it to our guide to upcoming electric cars the moment it gets a date.
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Photos and film courtesy of Fiat; Fiat notes some images in the film were partly generated with AI. 1958 Fiat 600 Multipla photo by Calreyn88, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Multiplina dimensions and class are from Fiat’s Paris Motor Show presentation as reported by designboom. Quadricycle limits are from EU type-approval rules. Topolino and Microlino lengths are the makers’ figures.
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