Answers to Fiat questions

I'm actually going to answer a few questions from the paper we did in class today. Mostly because there were a couple that were really easy for me and didn't require much research.

The first question was, "Who makes them?"
Fiat is a brand of car just like Ford, GM, or Chevy. So Fiat cars are made by Fiat. There are a few places where they have partnered with other manufactures so I guess you could say that some of them are made by Peugeot, Suzuki, Nissan, India's Pune, and China's Nanjing. That is not unheard of in the automobile industry so the same could be said of many makes of cars but, we still call a Ford a Ford, not a Mazda (www.fiat.co.uk).

The second question was, "Why do they say Fiat?", which I assume asks where the name came from.
The Fiat company is currently named Fiat SpA (not sure what the SpA stands for but I plan to find out) When the company was first formed it was F.I.A.T, which stood for "Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Turino" (acronyms.thefreedictionary.com). With the help of the online site "babelfish"I was able to translate this to, Italian automobile factory in Turin.

The last question was, "Where are they made?"
This took a little more research and was the most interesting for me to find out. I had thought that Fiat was a mostly defunct car manufacturer that had maybe one or two plants around the world. If they're no longer available in America they can't be big right? Wrong. As recently as 1997 Fiat was the 6th largest automobile manufacturer in the world ("The Wall Street Journal"). They have factories on all but three of the seven continents, including six in Italy alone(www.fiat.co.uk). They are currently in negotiations with Chrysler to manufacture and sell the Fiat 500 here in the United States as early as next year .

The current manufacturing plants are:
Tychy, Poland (Where they currently make the new Fiat 500)
Sevel Nord, France (Partnered with Peugeot)
Sete Kagas, Brazil
Minas Gerais, Brazil
Roslyn, South Africa (Partnered with Nissan)
Esztergon, Hungary (Partnered with Suzuki)
Istanbul, Turkey
Pune, India (Partnered with Tata motors)
Jiangsu, China (Partnered with Nanjing)
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (assembly)
Turin, Italy (Where Fiat was born)
Lasio, Italy
Basilicata, Italy
Atessa, Italy
Pratola, Italy (Engine manufacturing)
Termoli, Italy (Fully automated fire engine production)
(www.fiat.co.uk)

In researching these questions I found out much more about the Fiat company than I thought possible. Infact I've decided to review the current Fiat company instead of just the specific make of Fiat that I own. This was a Great exercise in getting ready to research and write my essay. If you can think of any more questions that are might be worth answering please post them here or ask me in class.


An interesting bit of Fiat trivia: Luigi, from the Disney movie Cars, was a 1959 Fiat 500 ragtop.