Abarth 600e Review: Electric, But Still A Proper Hot Hatch

Abarth’s first crack at an electric hot hatch, the 500e, is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s zippy, nippy and grippy when the mood takes you, but quite irritating in lots of ways and not actually that hot. The bigger Abarth 600e, then, can’t really afford to suffer from difficult second album syndrome.

It’s the hot version of the Fiat 600, a car that comes in both electric and petrol guise, but in the Abarth, electricity is your only option. The setup is familiar from a couple of other small, hot EVs that have emerged from Stellantis in the last year or so, namely the Alfa Romeo Junior Veloce and the (unavailable in the UK) Lancia Ypsilon HF.

They all share the same platform and 54kWh battery which feeds an electric motor on the front axle. That nets you a quoted 207 mile range, which is a bit rubbish these days – and you’ll probably find yourself driving it in a way that gets you a lot less than that. But more on that shortly.

The 600e currently comes in two different grades. The base car gets 236bhp, while the Scorpionissima – for now, a limited-edition launch version, but we imagine something similar will arrive as a regular range-topper eventually – packs 276bhp, putting it on par with the Junior Veloce. Both versions get 254lb ft of torque.

Both have lots of stuff that should make the ears of Serious Driving Enthusiasts prick up, too. There are EV-specific Michelin Pilot Sport tyres and Alcon brakes with big 380mm discs up front and four-piston callipers up front. The suspension and anti-roll bars have been tweaked by Stellantis’ motorsport wing, and there’s a mechanical Torsen limited-slip diff on the front. Even most petrol hot hatches these days try to get away with an electronically-locking setup, so this shows it’s at least trying to be serious.

It’s the Scorpionissima we’ve been driving. You won’t be interested in the extra driving assist tech or standard sat-nav, but you might be in the optional Hypnotic Purple paint, and you definitely will be in the excellent Sabelt bucket seats.

They’re by far the best parts of an interior that can otherwise feel a little dark and gloomy and features some cheap, scratchy materials. Rivals like the Mini Aceman JCW and Cupra Born VZ are better in this department, although everything’s at least laid out logically in the Abarth.

You get three drive modes, and the first two – Turismo and Scorpion Street – don’t do much beyond changing how much power’s available to you and what your top speed is.

Scorpion Track, though, gives you the full complement of 276bhp and 254lb ft, allowing the 600e to hit 0-62mph in 5.9 seconds and a 124mph top speed. It does the usual sport mode stuff of weighting up the steering, sharpening the throttle and loosening the ESP’s grip, but it also completely eliminates any regenerative braking, so the friction brakes are doing all the work and there’s none of the weird pedal squidge you can get in some EVs as the handover happens. More good thinking.

In this mode, the 600e is quick but not viciously so. There’s the usual surge of electric power that can very quickly whisk you up to speed and allow you to execute stress-free overtakes, but there’s nothing that’s going to make your face hurt.

That’s not the point of a hot hatch, though, especially not this one. Thankfully, Abarth seems to have learned from the slightly joyless way the 500e sometimes goes about its business, because its big sibling is a proper hoot.

No matter what mode you’re in, the steering has a fairly meaty weight to it that can feel a bit odd when you’re just pottering about. Drive it like Abarth wants you to, though, and it’s tight and direct. Having no regen interfering with the brakes is a treat, too, with a firm, uncorrupted pedal allowing you to push down on brakes that bite hard.

The real party piece is that diff, though. You can get on the power ridiculously early in corners, and it pulls the trick that a really well-calibrated LSD on a front-driven car always does: instead of piling into screechy understeer, it hooks up and there’s a sense of the nose being pulled through the corner instead of pushing wide. It’s properly addictive, and on the kart track we tried it on as part of the drive, you could push the 600e to excitably cock a wheel like an old Clio 182.

The tradeoff for this sort of engineering black magic in nose-led cars has traditionally been a slightly busy front end during normal driving, but while there is the occasional bit of tramlining in the 600e, it’s well managed.

In fact, despite being such an aggressively set-up thing, the 600e doesn’t suffer a great deal as a daily. Abarth’s avoided making everything so stiff that it shatters your teeth whenever you run over an expansion joint. It feels impressively supple and composed however you’re driving it. It’s not the most refined thing, mind – nothing unbearable, but you do get a fair amount of tyre and road noise.

Ah yes, noise. When the Abarth 500e launched, much attention – none of it particularly positive – was drawn to the ‘sound generator’ that tried to replicate the raspy burble of the old petrol-powered Abarth 500.

It’s back in the 600e, but there’s good news. It’s far less obnoxiously loud both in and out of the car, tails off like an engine would when you lift off the throttle rather than just playing the same flat tone, and has a generally deeper, more serious noise to it. Most importantly, it’s much, much easier to switch off when its novelty inevitably wears off after about five minutes.

At £39,875 for the Scorpionissima and £36,975 for the base car, the 600e isn’t quite the sort of cheap and cheerful performance car once offered by Abarth, but you’re still paying less than you would for a Born VZ or Aceman JCW. Those cars might be more grown-up daily companions that get you further on a charge, but a hot hatch isn’t really about being grown-up.

No, the best hot hatches are bright, brash, slightly flimsy in places and, most importantly, put a big, daft grin on your face. All of these boxes are very much ticked by the 600e.