Junkyard Find: 1963 Fiat 1100D
Old Fiats aren’t uncommon in American self-serve wrecking yards these days, but the ones you find are almost always Sport Spiders— we’ve seen this ’71, this ’71 850, this ’73, this ’75, this terrifyingly rusty ’76, this ’78, and this ’80 so far in this series— but a Fiat 1100? This is a first for me.
This is the car upon which the beloved-by-India Premier Padmini was based, and it was built until 2001.
This 1100D is very rough and the engine is gone, although it does appear to be relatively rust-free.
This car probably wasn’t at all out of place as a daily driver in Berkeley or San Francisco. Even today, there’s a ’58 Multipla getting daily street use in the East Bay.
Worth restoring? Probably not. Some of the parts might live on, though.
Sadly, the Padmini taxis of Indias are being phased out.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Is it just coincidence that it looks like a Trabant?
A car like this one was the ONLY new car my father ever purchased, and was responsible for him only buying used vehicles afterward. It frequently broke down, and he had to wait as long as 3 months for replacement parts to arrive from Italy . He finally traded it in for a slightly used Beetle and drove German cars exclusively for the next 2 decades.