Fiat-Abarth 595

The long version

By the early 1960s Carlo Abarth had spent a decade building his reputation on exhaust systems and tuning kits for other people's cars, and the 595 was the moment that expertise turned into a factory-built product wearing his own badge on a Fiat showroom floor. The recipe was simple: take the 499cc twin from the ordinary Nuova 500, bore it out to 594cc, fit a bigger carburetor and an Abarth exhaust tuned for both noise and flow, and leave the rest of the car — all 500 kg of it — alone. The performance version briefly wore its own '595 SS' badge with 32 hp, enough to feel genuinely urgent in a car this light, and Fiat kept building them through two body updates, the round-taillight 500 D through 1965 and the 500 F after. Decades of cheap, plentiful Fiat 500 parts kept the 595 an accessible entry point into Italian classic ownership long after fancier exotics had left ordinary buyers behind, and it still shows up at historic rallies and Italian car club meets rather than sitting exclusively in collections. Values have moved up steadily rather than spiked — good examples now clear the mid five figures in dollars — proportionate appreciation for a car that was always meant to be driven, not admired from a rope line.