The Abarth 500e Just Got A Whole Lot Cheaper

The Abarth 500e, while not without its flaws as anyone who’s stood within 30 feet of one ‘idling’ can attest to, is a very solid first crack at a sporting EV from Fiat’s in-house tuner.

The thing is, it hasn’t been selling well. Like, at all. Demand for it and its less sporty Fiat-badged sibling has been so slow of late, in fact, that the factory in Turin, Italy that builds them has faced weeks of shutdowns in the last few months.

That’s something that all EVs have been facing for the last year or so, but we suspect something battery-powered is a particularly hard sell to fans of a brand with a modern reputation built on rorty, noisy little four-cylinder engines. It’s also quite expensive for a small and not hugely powerful car, with UK pricing previously kicking off at £34,195.

Now, Abarth, in the UK at least, is attempting to give sales a bit of a kickstart by slashing a whole £4220 off the car’s entry price, which now sits at £29,975.

It’s not quite as simple as Abarth dealers crossing out ‘£34,195’ on the cars’ windscreens and writing ‘£29,975’ in Sharpie. £3000 of the discount comes from Fiat’s ‘E Grant’. That has nothing to do with the star of Withnail and I, but is rather a discount that Fiat already offers on the regular 500e and 600e EVs in response to the UK government discontinuing its own incentives for EV buyers in 2022.

Previously, that discount was offered to dealers on the basis that they’d pass it on to customers, a Fiat spokesperson told Autocar, but now it’s being included in the list price instead.

That means it can now apply to fleet buyers as well as private sales, which is crucial in the current new car market in the UK, especially for EVs, where fleet sales currently make up a massive proportion of the overall electric car market.

Whether it’s a successful move remains to be seen: the 500e is a fun car in its own right, but before this price drop, it was priced among more complete rivals like the Mini Cooper SE and Alpine A290. A more aggressive pricing strategy should at least give it a better shot, but whether it’ll be enough to sway fans of Abarth’s petrol-powered past is another matter.