The Amigo vanny magnet
Something tells me I need a new home... and it's not just the pleasing result of making the bathroom look a lot less shite than it was before. I probably mentioned it before, but one of the things I'd quite like for the future (as opposed to what I need) is a camper van. The aim is that it will be parked on my front drive by the time I turn 40, which could be a problem. Yes, I know I could go out and buy one right now, but there's the slight inconvenience of not being able to afford to run it and the much larger inconvenience that I have nowhere to park it. The drive is occupied by the Intergalactic Battlecruiser... and I wouldn't want to leave it on the street. So what I'd need before buying the camper is a bigger house, either with a garage, or at least two parking spaces!
Campers, though, come in many shapes and sizes and given that it'd only ever be me using it, a small one would do just fine. On the left of the pictures that I've posted below is the familiar shape of the Volkswagen Type 2...
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...while on the right is the (probably) less familiar shape of the Fiat 900E. Squarer, and shorter in every dimension.
Back when I was somewhat younger, lived in Essex and still had two parents alive (so that's a long time ago now), there was a used caravan and camper dealer somewhere around Takeley, on what is now the B1256. It was in there I first saw a 1980/81 Fiat 900E camper and was stunned by how small it was. I even remember that it was in this fetching shade of blue. I can even remember such geeky and seemingly insignificant details which will have you screaming "how do you remember that... and why?" such as the numberplate (NUD 338W) and even the font of the plate itself (VAG's angular-top-3 style that was popular at the time - and I remind you all, we've been here before with me talking about fonts so why are you all surprised?)
What I can't remember, though, was which conversion it was. The red one you see above (yes, it is red) is the rather rare MI Caravelle, the bright blue one with its lid already flipped is the far more popular Amigo, and the other popular version was the Pandora, which had a much chunkier roof that was far more substantial with the lid up. I think NUD 338W may have been a Pandora as I vaguely remember the blackout panel where the final side window should be, but I can't be quoted on that - and given that it wasn't the finest example to grace the roads of Essex even in the late 90s when it hadn't passed its 20th birthday, it has probably long since rusted away to oblivion. Fiats of the day tended to do that - this was back when the Italians traded their old designs to the Soviet Union in exchange for a supply of Soviet steel - which no amount of communist propaganda could hide was of poor quality and tended to have started oxidising before whatever car or van was built from it had even been delivered. (I must, at some stage, have spun the story of my dad's Fiat 131 which he bought in anticipation of me arriving in 1979... and by the time it was offloaded in September 1985 there was a rust hole in the passenger door the size of my six-year-old fist. That's how bad it could be.)
Problem number two with the 900E is its catastrophic lack of power. It was originally launched in 1962 as the 600T, derived from the bizarre 600 Multipla (the link's in Italian but you can see the picture), apparently to combat third-party conversions of the Multipla into a useful van. With a 633 cc (24 hp) engine it would rattle along at 57 mph absolutely flat out, so it wasn't exactly designed for long-distance cruising. After only two years the 600T became the 850T with a slightly bigger 843 cc (33 hp) engine, which served plenty of Italian businesses just fine and the first camper conversions started to appear (this one's from 1970/71). Then, in 1976, came the facelifted 900T - not only with the 903 cc (35 hp) engine from the MkII Fiat 127, but also the square front headlights. Gone were the days of the huge, goggly round things that didn't quite suit the 850T. The 900E was the final variant in 1980 - it sprouted the rear lights from the MkII 127 as well. And that's the one that marched on until 1985, to the end of production. Or was it? Because, like so many Fiats, it managed to shuffle across to Eastern Europe - the 850/900T/E was built in what was still Yugoslavia as the Zastava 850/900AK, and my Serbian isn't anywhere near good enough to hunt for production dates, but I'll wager it was still being made long after production had stopped in Italy.
So it's rusty and it's slow, but to this day this Italian miniature home away from home remains my all-time favourite - well ahead of the far more popular but far more expensive and equally slow Volkswagen Type 2. If I had an unlimited amount of cash I'd find a decent 900E, strip it completely, repair and re-galvanise the entire body to give it 21st Century standards of corrosion protection... but I'd still have to sort out the performance for long slogs on the motorway. And help might be at hand from the unlikely source that is... Ford. The original Fiat 903 cc engine, dating from 1969, is very weedy, but also very small. And I'd wager that the 2012 1.0 (127 hp) EcoBoost engine - the one that's said to fit on a sheet of A4 paper! - stands a good chance of fitting in the engine bay, and the chances are there'd be a crashed Fiesta or Focus out there (yes, Ford even put this tiddler in a Focus and it does just fine) to donate the engine. Imagine what all those extra horses could do; replacing a 35 hp engine with one that has almost four times the grunt should see it move properly and save on fuel costs!
But I don't have an unlimited amount of cash, and I could never look after one of these Fiats properly, especially as the last one off the production like (in Italy at least) is just hitting its 30th birthday. Help may be at hand, though, from the land where smaller is better: Japan. They have to build vans to "kei" regulations as well as cars (anyone remember the Bedford Rascal? That was one that was officially sold here - it was a Suzuki Carry in its homeland) and, unsurprisingly, there are camper conversions like this bonkers Mazda. And the Japanese version of the MOT is so painfully strict that no car over six years old has much of a hope of passing... which is why so many of them end up over here where they could go on and on with their endless Japanese reliability for 20-plus more years. Yes, I know, while the Bedford Rascal was given a 1-litre engine for the European market, anything coming in from Japan will be restricted to 660 cc by the "kei" laws... but it will have a turbocharger on it, so it won't be tragically slow, neither will it drink expensive petrol like Baz drinks Newcastle Brown. And everything on it will work flawlessly forever.
The idea of all this is so that I can keep on going to festivals well into my 40s. Even now I find it near-unbelievable that there was once a time when sitting cross-legged on the floor in school assembly was completely normal... trying to do so at three times that age is four times as uncomfortable as I remember and takes probably ten times longer to get up than it did then. Eventually the simple matter of getting in and out of a tent is going to be too much...
It is time to rage against... if not the dying of the light, then certainly the dying of the cheap Chinese batteries that are powering it.
Campers, though, come in many shapes and sizes and given that it'd only ever be me using it, a small one would do just fine. On the left of the pictures that I've posted below is the familiar shape of the Volkswagen Type 2...
...while on the right is the (probably) less familiar shape of the Fiat 900E. Squarer, and shorter in every dimension.
Back when I was somewhat younger, lived in Essex and still had two parents alive (so that's a long time ago now), there was a used caravan and camper dealer somewhere around Takeley, on what is now the B1256. It was in there I first saw a 1980/81 Fiat 900E camper and was stunned by how small it was. I even remember that it was in this fetching shade of blue. I can even remember such geeky and seemingly insignificant details which will have you screaming "how do you remember that... and why?" such as the numberplate (NUD 338W) and even the font of the plate itself (VAG's angular-top-3 style that was popular at the time - and I remind you all, we've been here before with me talking about fonts so why are you all surprised?)
What I can't remember, though, was which conversion it was. The red one you see above (yes, it is red) is the rather rare MI Caravelle, the bright blue one with its lid already flipped is the far more popular Amigo, and the other popular version was the Pandora, which had a much chunkier roof that was far more substantial with the lid up. I think NUD 338W may have been a Pandora as I vaguely remember the blackout panel where the final side window should be, but I can't be quoted on that - and given that it wasn't the finest example to grace the roads of Essex even in the late 90s when it hadn't passed its 20th birthday, it has probably long since rusted away to oblivion. Fiats of the day tended to do that - this was back when the Italians traded their old designs to the Soviet Union in exchange for a supply of Soviet steel - which no amount of communist propaganda could hide was of poor quality and tended to have started oxidising before whatever car or van was built from it had even been delivered. (I must, at some stage, have spun the story of my dad's Fiat 131 which he bought in anticipation of me arriving in 1979... and by the time it was offloaded in September 1985 there was a rust hole in the passenger door the size of my six-year-old fist. That's how bad it could be.)
Problem number two with the 900E is its catastrophic lack of power. It was originally launched in 1962 as the 600T, derived from the bizarre 600 Multipla (the link's in Italian but you can see the picture), apparently to combat third-party conversions of the Multipla into a useful van. With a 633 cc (24 hp) engine it would rattle along at 57 mph absolutely flat out, so it wasn't exactly designed for long-distance cruising. After only two years the 600T became the 850T with a slightly bigger 843 cc (33 hp) engine, which served plenty of Italian businesses just fine and the first camper conversions started to appear (this one's from 1970/71). Then, in 1976, came the facelifted 900T - not only with the 903 cc (35 hp) engine from the MkII Fiat 127, but also the square front headlights. Gone were the days of the huge, goggly round things that didn't quite suit the 850T. The 900E was the final variant in 1980 - it sprouted the rear lights from the MkII 127 as well. And that's the one that marched on until 1985, to the end of production. Or was it? Because, like so many Fiats, it managed to shuffle across to Eastern Europe - the 850/900T/E was built in what was still Yugoslavia as the Zastava 850/900AK, and my Serbian isn't anywhere near good enough to hunt for production dates, but I'll wager it was still being made long after production had stopped in Italy.
So it's rusty and it's slow, but to this day this Italian miniature home away from home remains my all-time favourite - well ahead of the far more popular but far more expensive and equally slow Volkswagen Type 2. If I had an unlimited amount of cash I'd find a decent 900E, strip it completely, repair and re-galvanise the entire body to give it 21st Century standards of corrosion protection... but I'd still have to sort out the performance for long slogs on the motorway. And help might be at hand from the unlikely source that is... Ford. The original Fiat 903 cc engine, dating from 1969, is very weedy, but also very small. And I'd wager that the 2012 1.0 (127 hp) EcoBoost engine - the one that's said to fit on a sheet of A4 paper! - stands a good chance of fitting in the engine bay, and the chances are there'd be a crashed Fiesta or Focus out there (yes, Ford even put this tiddler in a Focus and it does just fine) to donate the engine. Imagine what all those extra horses could do; replacing a 35 hp engine with one that has almost four times the grunt should see it move properly and save on fuel costs!
But I don't have an unlimited amount of cash, and I could never look after one of these Fiats properly, especially as the last one off the production like (in Italy at least) is just hitting its 30th birthday. Help may be at hand, though, from the land where smaller is better: Japan. They have to build vans to "kei" regulations as well as cars (anyone remember the Bedford Rascal? That was one that was officially sold here - it was a Suzuki Carry in its homeland) and, unsurprisingly, there are camper conversions like this bonkers Mazda. And the Japanese version of the MOT is so painfully strict that no car over six years old has much of a hope of passing... which is why so many of them end up over here where they could go on and on with their endless Japanese reliability for 20-plus more years. Yes, I know, while the Bedford Rascal was given a 1-litre engine for the European market, anything coming in from Japan will be restricted to 660 cc by the "kei" laws... but it will have a turbocharger on it, so it won't be tragically slow, neither will it drink expensive petrol like Baz drinks Newcastle Brown. And everything on it will work flawlessly forever.
The idea of all this is so that I can keep on going to festivals well into my 40s. Even now I find it near-unbelievable that there was once a time when sitting cross-legged on the floor in school assembly was completely normal... trying to do so at three times that age is four times as uncomfortable as I remember and takes probably ten times longer to get up than it did then. Eventually the simple matter of getting in and out of a tent is going to be too much...
It is time to rage against... if not the dying of the light, then certainly the dying of the cheap Chinese batteries that are powering it.