I owned a bright yellow 500 for several years, and loved the hell out of it, until I wound up having to sit in it for more than 2 hours at a stretch, at which point I wanted to kill whoever designed those seats. Amusingly when it turned out that (after we traded that in for a larger subaru) that I needed a car for commuting to the new gig, I bought a Dart, which is basically the Fiat but with back seats and a trunk.

>The Fender Edition doesn't have navigation (which, annoyingly, means
>that head unit won't support a rearview camera), but it does have

That is a big bummer. Rearview camera is possibly the single best feature I've seen in "economy" cars in the last several years. It makes things like backing up in cramped parking garages (a daily occurrence for me) less obnoxious.

>The plug in the 12V power socket, which would have been a cigarette
>lighter in earlier times, isn't just a chunk of plastic (though it did come >with one, it's in the glove compartment); it's a little flashlight that
>keeps itself charged off the 12V system while it's plugged in there.

Ooh, that *is* nice. Never would have occurred to me.

>Full disclosure: I am crap at selecting shift points in Tiptronic mode
>so far, and generally I just leave it in automatic mode. However,
>when I have tried it out, it's been pretty fun. Not as satisfying as
>stomping a clutch pedal and moving a lever around, no, but pretty
>good, ad also harder to screw up apart from picking the wrong gear for
>your current speed and lurching around at some untoward RPMs for a
>bit. The computer won't actually let you blow up the valve train, so
>there's no harm in experimenting. I just haven't practiced with it
>enough yet to get good at it.

The thing I've found it best for (I have a similar system in my Dart) is when dealing with merging at speed on a freeway. Bang it down into 4th so that your turbo is, in fact, already spun up and you have some torque as soon as you tap on the gas, not "wait, hang on, you wanted to accelerate, lemme downshift and NOW, oh wait that gap closed up and you can't merge"

>occasionally be adventuresome moments when the turbo comes in when you
>weren't expecting it ("Not now, Cato!"), but not to a dangerous
>degree; it's just slightly bemusing. I find myself talking to it like
>it's a mildly twitchy horse. "Easy there, now."

>In that same vein, I can't speak to the rear head or legroom, but I
>expect they're not very good. The Beetle coupe is definitely what
>they used to call a "2+2" configuration and not a proper four-seater.
>Then again, my previous car didn't have a back seat at all and I never
>once found myself wishing it did, so it's unlikely to be an issue for
>me.

This was very much how the Fiat felt. My wife and I aren't small people, and with us comfortable, we had trouble fitting a pair of seven year olds in the rear seats.

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."