Fiat Grande Panda Review & Prices

If someone brought back shell suits and miner’s strikes, we probably wouldn’t be too happy about it, but the Fiat Grande Panda is a welcome throwback to the 1980s. The Grande Panda is based on the same mechanical bits as the Citroen C3, but Fiat has given its compact, boxy hatchback a much bigger dose of style.

That starts on the very square nose, itself a major call-back to the now-legendary original Fiat Panda, which has groovy ‘pixel’ LED lights and a return to the simple Fiat badge of just having the name spelled out in big letters.

Down the sides, the Panda’s boxy, upright shape is broken up a little by a big panel that runs across the bottom of the doors, with the word ‘Panda’ embossed into it in letters that could have been lifted from an original copy of a ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ LP.

At the back, there’s more big, bold, Fiat badging and more pixellated LED lights. In spite of the Grande Panda’s close relationship under the skin to the Citroen C3, you’d never mistake one car for the other, and the Italian hatch is a car that definitely rewards a bold, bright paint scheme. Just like the original, really.

Inside, the Grande Panda treads a very fine line between cheap and characterful. The square-edged styling gives everything a touch of panache, and higher-spec versions come with wood trim on the dashboard that’s made from bamboo. Pandas, bamboo, geddit?

However, instead of using soft-touch plastics, Fiat has instead used hard plastics (which are cheaper to make) but with a splash of colour dyed into the material, and thrown in some woven cloth trim to provide a bit of comforting softness in the design.

If the Citroen C3 is anything to go by, interior space should be reasonable. However, the boot is much bigger in the Fiat, and at 412 litres is around 30 litres more than you get in a considerably larger Volkswagen Golf. Expect the trade off to be tight rear seat space.

Even a basic ‘Pop’ version of the Grande Panda gets a pair of big 10.0-inch screens - one for the driver’s instruments and one for the infotainment - and thankfully Fiat has kept some proper buttons for air conditioning and heating, which should be easier to use on the move than an all-touchscreen arrangement.

For the moment, unless you want to go for the Fiat Grande Panda Electric, there’s only one engine option for the Grande Panda, and that’s a 110hp 1.2-litre hybrid engine. This takes a leisurely ten seconds to reach 62mph, but should be good for around 50mpg in real-world driving conditions, backed up by a 28hp electric motor for short bursts of zero-emissions driving.

We’ll update this review with our first-hand impressions once we get to drive this stylish small car, but until then you can still check out the latest Fiat Grande Panda deals as well as Grande Panda leasing deals. You can also browse used Fiats from our network of trusted dealers, and when the time comes to sell your car, Carwow can help with that, too.

The Grande Panda isn’t super-cheap, but in hybrid form it does have a starting price of under £20,000 which is decent considering the solid levels of standard equipment.

It’s tempting to upgrade to a pricier ‘La Prima’ model to get the bamboo trim and some snazzy alloys, but there’s a kind of pleasant honesty about a basic Pop version on its 16-inch steel wheels.

The Citroen C3 is the most obvious alternative to the Grande Panda, as both cars are similarly priced and they’re identical under the skin, or you could spend slightly more and get a Skoda Fabia which has a roomier interior (albeit a smaller boot). While a basic Dacia Sandero is nowhere near as stylish as a Grande Panda, it would save you around £4,000 up front, which is not to be sneezed at.