Fiat Coupé 16v: damp, dormant, defiant – a real-world ownership update

It’s been a while since the last update on the Fiat. Unless you read Classic.Retro.Modern., of course – and if you don’t, well… why not?

Life intervened rather abruptly in October, thanks to a family medical emergency, and the Coupé slipped into the background. Parked up. Ignored. Unloved. For a full two months. Which, as it turns out, is plenty of time for a mid-1990s Italian car to decide whether it still respects you.

Devon didn’t help. The temperate rainforest conditions meant moss on the outside and mould on the inside: the full abandoned-Fiat-in-a-hedge look, achieved without leaving the driveway. As things dried out, I also noticed something more troubling: the paintwork is now peppered with small bubbles, like staring at a can of 7-Up too closely.

I’ve seen this before. When we moved to Devon, the Capri 280 blistered not long after arrival, revealing past paint sins. The Mk1 Golf GTI did the same and was promptly sold. A bit of late-night internet sleuthing suggests ‘solvent pop’: lacquer applied before the paint cured, trapping gases beneath the surface. Which rather implies the Fiat isn’t wearing its original paint. That might also explain the missing Fiat badge on the rear. Anyway, not today’s biggest problem.

That arrived on the way back from a photo shoot in Oxfordshire, fresh from what was both a successful and expensive MOT. About ten miles from home, in the dark and the rain, the battery light flickered on. At the same time, the engine began hunting at idle. Alternator? Belt? Italian sense of humour? I parked the worry along with the car and, thanks to everything else going on, forgot about it completely.

Fast forward eight weeks. Against the odds, it fired first turn of the key. Credit where it’s due: excellent battery, and later checks with a multimeter suggested the alternator was behaving itself too. I drove it. It went brilliantly. For a bit.

Then the dribbling hosepipe light came on. Italicar’s phrase, not mine – and their excellent Fiat Coupé buyer’s guide confirms it’s essentially the equivalent of an EML, which is to say it could mean anything. Coming through the village, clutch down, the engine cut out repeatedly. Restart, stall, restart. Not ideal.

The distributor cap and rotor arm looked like they’d been there since the mid-’90s, so I replaced both with new items from Ricambio: excellent service, sensible prices. And for about £20, it felt like victory. Better idle. Smoother acceleration. Job done.

Until it wasn’t.

Roundabout. Rain. Battery light. Dribbling hosepipe. Engine off. Again. I limped it to Mum’s, but the problem was still there an hour later: uphill, wet, and deeply unconvincing. Interestingly, driving gently, keeping the revs low and changing up early seemed to prevent the issue entirely. Which means more investigation is required, and trust remains in short supply.

Still – and this is the important bit – in a brief lull in the rain, on a quiet stretch of road, it felt magnificent again. The character. The soul. The exact reason I fell for it last year. That slightly dangerous feeling that I could sack off everything else and pour all my time, effort and money into this flawed little Italian wonder.

I won’t. Obviously. Probably.

But even now – damp, dented, bubbling, intermittently sulking – the Fiat still does something to me. And that, as ever, is what keeps it here.