Fiat 126

Fiat’s replacement for the original 500, and, like the 500 before it, a rear-engined, two-cylinder city car built down to a price rather than up to a standard.^[1] It ran for 28 years on a single generation, Autocar later counting it the twenty-sixth longest-lived single-generation car ever built, mostly because Fiat itself stopped selling it in Western Europe in 1993 while its licensee in Poland kept building it for another seven years. There, as the Polski Fiat 126p (“Maluch,” the little one), it became a bigger cultural fact than it ever was in Italy: for much of the 1970s and 1980s it was the only car most Polish families could actually buy.