But gone now are the days when a new car could be named after a wind or a high-end holiday resort and come bristling with fins and ridges and jagged chrome add-ons. Typically, the modern small car appears to take its name from software or personal electronics and resembles a sucked boiled sweet. It meets some of our time's resistance to the very idea of cars halfway. If not exactly in denial, it is, at least, apologetic about being a car, less overtly purposeful in its shape and ready-to-use cuteness, in the form of a pair of Bambi-esque dish-sized headlamps, as a diversionary tactic. Cars such as the Fiat 500, the Mini, the Nissan Micra, the Toyota Yaris and the Hyundai i30 look so innocent, you are surprised they drink gas at all, rather than, say, fruit juice, mixed with the occasional Jelly Tot.
The new 500 also presses all the hot-button contemporary motoring issues: consumption, emissions, congestion. It sips gas, guffs out a relatively small amount of carbon dioxide, and takes up little space. Whisper the fact that, for many buyers, a 500 will be a second car, the need for which may be highly questionable and not easily rationalized on the basis of the car's frugal economy figures. The point is, the original 500 was the product of a postwar economy - a budget motor made for a world in which resources were thin on the ground - so perhaps it shouldn't surprise us to find its shape and ethos re-appealing in an age when questions about limited resources again apply.
But the Fiat 500 has history on its side, too. It fondly harks back, however deceptively, to a time when driving was a more innocent thing to get up to, when the road ahead to the corner shop lay more open and when the notion that the world might be frying in its own fat was not one that routinely needed to burden a car owner's conscience. No wonder people across Europe are jumping in.
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