Fiat 130 Coupé by Pininfarina _ Ultimate Review & Road Test

Hi , everybody .

This is Mike .

And today I want to present my 1972 130 coup by or like the Italians would say , and they always say that in an a tone because there has always been a legend around this car and fiat's attempt to challenge the big players in the luxury market .

I want to tell you all facts about the car .

I want to show you all special and strange details .

Then I found a nice promotional clip from fiat from the seventies which I want to show you .

And last but not least , I also found a Bud Spencer movie where he drives a blue fiat 130 coup chasing a Lamborghini ASDA .

And that's definitely also worth to have a look at .

So I hope you enjoy my tour .

The fiat 130 coup was designed by far but not Farina himself , but Paolo Martin and Leonardo Fioravanti of and it was produced between 1971 and 1977 in just 4491 units .

That's mostly due to the very high price tag of 28,000 Deutsche mark in 1971 .

I mean to put that in comparison , a portion 9 11 T was just 23,000 Deutsche Marks .

So the field was 20% more expensive than a portion 9 11 and the Mercedes 280 S class was less than 20,000 Deutsche mark .

So the fiat was 40% more expensive than the cheapest S class .

And if you look at the options like Air Con in my fiat that added another 2100 Deutsche Marks .

So only the price of this option is the equivalent of half a fiat 500 which was 3700 Dedge marks for the whole car .

So it's not totally surprising that potential buyers were rare , but quite a lot of celebrities left the exclusive fiat among them , Marcelo Mastrianni , the famous Italian actor , film Diva Sofia Loin , Dusty Springfield , one of the greatest British singers , Giovanni Ali , the big Italian industrialist and owner of fiat had several 130 .

Among them , a special red colored coup and a one off shooting break called Mama .

Then and Ferrari also drove a 130 coup as his private car .

Another celebrity owner was Giovanni Leone , the president of Italy from 1971 to 78 .

He ordered it in a special light blue color and this very car is currently for sale in Italy .

Another top notch politician driving the fiat 130 coup was Lord Carrington British Foreign Secretary and later Secretary General of NATO , I think this list of celebrity owners is quite impressive , but unfortunately , it didn't help fear to sell more cars to the general public .

The clean and angular design was very unique and different for its time and inspired a lot of other cars from the seventies .

So it's often seen as a milestone in automotive design .

And Sergio Pin Farina himself called it his masterpiece .

I think it has a very aristocratic appearance also because of its massive size of 4.85 m .

So even if people don't know what it is , they instinctively know it is something special and exclusive .

Ok .

Let's have a look at the technical details .

The 130 is powered by a 3.2 liter V six engine developed by Aurelio Lampre who worked for Ferrari before where he developed the famous V 12 engines of Ferrari's formula one cars in the 19 fifties .

The engine has twin and produces 165 horsepower , which is good for 195 kilometer per hour or 120 MPH and no to 60 time of 10.6 seconds .

Interestingly , the three speed automatic was standard in this car and the five speed manual was the option and there are also a lot of other usual options that were standard in this car , like the power steering , the electric windows , the four wheel disc brakes , and so on .

If he had also had four wheel independent suspension .

Henley was very good considering the size of the car and the year that it was produced .

And I would say on a small curvy road driven a little bit faster , it handles better and corners more precisely than the Jaguar X J s which I had before .

There was a quality feeling every detail of this car and that's absolutely not usual for a Italian car of the seventies and fiat claims that every 130 was test driven by fiat engineers for one day before it was delivered to the customer in old road tests .

There were just complaints about a noisy engine which I would not agree because I think the sound is very nice and complaints about the fuel consumption , which is something around 15 liters per 100 kilometer or 18 MPG .

And I would add one thing .

I always have big problems with cold start .

So I usually need two attempts to start the engine when it's really cold .

And , um , that's something that , um , is probably not an engineering mistake , but there is just something wrong probably with my car .

So I would have to have that checked and maybe then I can manage to start with the first attempt , which should really be possible .

I think I found a nice promotional video about the 130 coupe from the seventies published by Chen Roto and that one I wanna show you now make her no dad .

It .

And this is the Bud Spencer movie Flat Food from 1973 where a Blue Feared 130 coop driven by Bud Spencer chases a red Lamborghini as part .

This is it .

I'm hunting out the bell to get off .

Right .

Piano playing roo .

Yeah .

Wow .

Look at this .

Yeah .

Uh , first thing to see when you open the door , of course , the funky orange brown velvet seats , which looks so posh seventies fashion and same with the two spoke steering wheel , which is a typical seventies design feature .

The dashboard features seven gauges plus a clock .

And then there is this big center console with wood veneer and the beautiful array of toggle switches which look much more like a high end British sports car from the sixties .

Some of them have really interesting functions like this one here .

You can select two different speeds for the wipers , but there is a separate lever to activate the wipers here .

My favorite switch is this one here .

With that one , you can select two different tones for the horn , a friendly one for the city and a more passionate one for the motorway .

Wouldn't that be a nice feature to have in any modern car as well ?

This switch here is the heated back window .

This one is a light for the interior and then you have this switch here to move the electric antenna up and down and this is the hazard light you have probably noticed already that there is an alpine radio which doesn't really fit in the car because it's much too modern .

But before you start complaining and write some comments , I have already ordered a nice period .

Correct punk radio , which I will install later and show you in a separate video .

Then this is also a nice feature .

So there is a big glove box up here , but then there is a second smaller glove box here underneath .

Another favorite feature is the trick to open the passenger door .

I mean , usually you would lean over and try to grab this handle here , but that wouldn't look elegant .

So you have this smart lever down here below the steering wheel .

And with that one , you can open the passenger door without control movements .

Then there are these two levers here on the center console .

The one on the right hand side is a choke .

That's a normal feature for a seventies car with cars .

But the one on the left hand side is something special .

It is a hand gas lever so you can adjust the idling speed or you could even use it as a basic form of cruise control .

Here are the control switches for the air con and that's really a very rare feature for a European car of the seventies and it was incredibly expensive .

And today it's still fully functional .

The car has power windows and here are the controls , which is for that .

But it operates in a very modest speed .

That's how the car looks in the backside .

So there are two very comfortable seats in the backside , which are absolutely enough for long journeys .

So it's a real four seater coop .

Funny thing here at the backside is there is a manual lever here for the backside windows and with that one , you can open the windows just a little bit for one inch for better ventilation .

A bit quirky is the position of the hand brake lever here on the left hand side .

And I already told you the same story for the lotus s where it's absolutely similar system , but here it is a little bit worse .

So , I mean , just to show you again how it operates , I mean , obviously to engage it , you pull it up , but then you can move the lever down and it is still engaged .

That's fine .

But it doesn't really have this importance like in the lotus because in the lotus , it is somewhere here and you couldn't just , you could just not get in and out of the car with the handbrake engaged .

I mean , here it wouldn't matter if it just stays up .

So if you want to disengage it , press the button , pull it up again and then down and it is disengaged and you can go , this would not be a problem yet because you get used to this procedure .

But there is one really maximum annoying thing .

So I will show you now what happens when you have the hand brake engaged and you try to start the engine , it starts ringing like a vintage telephone and doesn't stop anymore .

And that's really the single most annoying feature of that car or I have to stop that .

Otherwise you cannot hear me anymore .

So that's really the single most annoying feature of that car because you have parked the car , you have the hand brake and engaged .

You want to start the engine .

I mean , with that annoying ring tone , you cannot really even hear when the engine fires up .

Also , let's say you wait at the traffic light and the road is a little bit uh slope upwards .

So you want to engage the hand brake because you want to relax your foot on the brake .

You don't want to stand with your foot on the brake all the time , but you use the hand brake and it will continue ringing like that for the whole time .

You stand at the traffic light .

I mean , how can any engineer think that this is a clever idea to have this annoying ring tone any time you use the hand brake ?

I mean , a small red warning light would be fine enough and everyone would know that the hand brake is engaged like in the lotus would know they have this ring tone .

So this is the single most annoying thing of the fear .

130 coop and I really have to find a solution to disconnect that because it drives me crazy .

The manual gearbox doesn't have the standard eight shift pattern , but it has a dog leg layout .

So first gear is left to the backside and second is then straight up , third straight back , especially because all of my other cars have the standard eight shift pattern .

I always have to concentrate a little bit when doing a fast gear change here in this car as this is an old car , it comes with a whole collection of keys .

So this is for the ignition .

This is for the doors that's for the boot and this is for the glove box , not really convenient , but yeah , I would say typical for an old car , by the way , opening the boot is a bit tricky .

So you have to hin down the number plate to get access to the keyhole .

And for this procedure , you need two hands because otherwise it pops back with a spring .

So this is a bit quirky and un handy because if you have uh shopping stuff in your hand , it's nearly impossible to open the boot and you have to put your shopping stuff somewhere on the floor to open the boot with two hands here outside .

I still want to show you the very special wheels of the 130 coup .

They are not made of aluminum like you would think , but out of magnesium and that's a material that in the seventies , a lot of super cars used like the age or the beta boxer and the 130 got these magnesium wheels as standard equipment .

Ok , guys , that was the review about my fear .

130 coop .

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I would really appreciate and see you next time .