500 Abarth

Make
Fiat
Segment
Hatchback

In the age of social media, auto manufacturers have never had a closer relationship with their customers. Brands are constantly interacting with fans and customers on a wide range of topics, and these interactions are now having a direct impact on how cars are being developed. Fiat, together with its performance sub-brand Abarth, is responsible for awesome little Italian sports cars such as the Fiat 500 Abarth and the Fiat 124 Spider Abarth, the latter sharing its underpinnings with the Mazda MX-5 Miata.

Now, Abarth is approaching its fans to help it with an important task. The Stellantis-owned company wants its most loyal fans to help choose the AVAS (Acoustic Vehicle Alert System) acoustic warning for pedestrians, and it sounds like a rocking good time. This piece of sound design will be applied to an electric Abarth model that will appear in the "near to mid-term future" - last year, we found out that Abarth will go electric in 2024.

Abarth is preparing upcoming EV vehicles and a part of that is getting its cars to be compliant with all the rules and regulations in the markets where it sells its cars. We know that brands such as BMW have been getting creative with their EV sounds, and Abarth wants to do the same, but with some customer input. The brand has three sounds on the "starting grid" and has launched a preliminary online survey on Abarth's official Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok channels.

The first tone is called "Next Track" and is inspired by the sounds of Formula E and motorsport in general. The second sound is entitled "Cyber Fun" and is inspired by gaming culture and youthful Tik-Tokkers. Finally, there's "Rock'n Roar" which features sweeping guitar sounds for all those heavy metal Nickelback fans. The Abarth Performance Creator, a new collaborative tool on the brand's social media channels, will eventually allow fans to co-create Abarth cars of the future.

Olivier Francois, FIAT & Abarth Chief Executive Officer and Global Chief Marketing Officer of Stellantis, wants to disrupt the traditional school of thought when it comes to developing new sports cars, and believes that Abarth fans should play a larger role in the creation of new products.

"Our disruptive and unique strategy is to increasingly involve the Scorpion community to "design" the future of the brand together. We have decided to start with the AVAS sound because we want to turn a conventional legal sound into an Abarth signature! We want to know what the vehicles should be like, what they should sound like, or which driving experience they should provide. That's why we have created the Performance Creator on our social media channel, an interactive tool that can give our many fans the chance to co-create our future in the pursuit of our shared values of Style and Performance - those which have always distinguished us on the sports car market," he says.