Fiat Tipo

Vehicle Overview

The Fiat Tipo is a passenger car belonging to the C-segment produced from 1988 to 1995. Designed during the period when FIAT’s CEO was Vittorio Ghidella, it was presented as the heir to the Fiat Ritmo; the internal design identified it as the Tipo Due, to indicate a placement somewhere between the Tipo Uno (Fiat Uno) and the Tipo Tre (Fiat Tempra). The model number is 160. The Fiat Tipo was Car of the Year in 1989 for its technological innovations. It was unveiled to the public on January 26, 1988, but the first final images were previewed by the trade press as early as the summer of 1987. In all ten versions in which it was produced, it was assembled at the Fiat plant in Cassino, capable of allowing the production of a thousand cars a day through state-of-the-art technology at the time in terms of processing machinery and materials used to build the cars. Only from 1989 to 1990 were a few examples also produced at the Alfa Romeo plant in Pomigliano d’Arco to ensure an adequate level of employment. Instead, the examples for the South American market were produced at the Betim plant in Brazil. After an initial mechanical and aesthetic overhaul, mainly in the front end and interior in March 1993, when many improvements were introduced, especially in terms of automotive safety, in the late summer of 1995 the Tipo was replaced by the Fiat Bravo/Brava (made on an evolution of the Tipo’s platform called the Fiat C platform) remaining in production for a short time still only for the Brazilian market. In 2015, Fiat unveiled a new model called the Tipo, but it is completely autonomous from the car of the 1980s and 1990s.