I looked in depth at these last year and decided as it’s discontinued and also a few mentioned about the turbo lag it was a none starter.
I liked them at first, the looks of it, then I didn’t then they grew on me again.
I always say, if in doubt, don’t go there.
1 Like
The 30AE is an excellent choice I saw one pre- lockdown at Sandicliffe in Loughborough when car hunting for my ND,
Beautiful Motor, excellent colour scheme, alas out of my budget!
1 Like
Hi Mick, sound similar to me, I have gone hot and cold on these for a while, but the 5 is such a great choice variations of engine and trim and if you fancy it a little targa style RF, the 124 Spider is attractive, but it had a short life as a UK option and I am unsure about the Engine set up; reliability, performance and even economy! I use my 5’s for my daily commute and my ND is brilliant 52.3 mpg and I don’t drive major frugally!
Yes I’m looking at the PRHT as a possible next purchase, of course that could be some time away, I’ve not got drive the one I have since the end of October.
The spider only has the soft top version although you can get the hard tops to fit, not really an option I’d go for.
The revised 2.0 litre engine has some punch too! - Really suits the car’s character 
Rob
1 Like
I like the idea of purchasing a revised 2.0 litre ND, probably well suited to my driving activity; I have to do a little bit of long distance commuting every month more at 
present with COVID situation and not having a good public transport option.
It should do. All about BHP per tonne, torque, and gearing is it not.
4 BHP more than my standard 3ltr Monza ( coupe "Police Senator) whose kerb weight rivalled a fully filled Supertanker and not 4 Kit-Kat wrappers! At 1400 kilos (!) the Opel worked out to a similar BHP per tonne as my 93 Eunos! 
The Opel GSE Courteney Turbo I had later was quite another matter…
How things move on.
Monza was very nice, Dad owned a couple of Vauxhall Royales, they were swift had crushed velour seats and a nice engine with loads of poke, yes happy days indeed!
1 Like
They had a name for rotting out too quickly.
According to the OC, GM used cheap Soviet sourced steels in the Poxhalls.
On the other hand, Opel used German steels…they still rotted out eventually but just took a lot longer.
As a rule, the front strut turrets ( not available) & A posts saw them off…which what happened to one of mine. I’d have needed to ship it down to a specialist in Cornwall to re-metal. £££££ so not viable.
The nearside turret mount punched up into the under-bonnet one day over a road-hump and warped the inner & outer wing right out!
I had a memorable experience in 2003 in Oz having a pax ride in an auto 5.7 litre GM V8 conversion in Victoria. From recall…around 400-odd + BHP. Words were not enough!
Suffice to say, I got it home with lots of…erm…toe-out! 
This sounds like a variation on the urban myth that Lada paid Fiat with steel for building them a factory. In the myth upon myth, Soviet steel became German/Nazi steel salvaged from the hulks at the Battle of Kursk. The other version is that the steel came from Whiskey submarines. Hence Lancias dissolved in the rain. All pub myths. Its a pretty good variation that the Germans decided to punish the English pig dogs in Luton with dodgy metal.
These tropes takes a few truisms (Fiat built the Soviets a cars factory, Italian cars generally rust, some Italians are Communists) to make them believable. In truth, the Soviet Union paid cash to Fiat, through obtaining a loan for $300m from the Italian bank IMI. There were no plane loads of gold arriving in Turin to be stolen by plucky Brits. The Americans were happy to go along with this, as their Intelligence indicated the machinery being purchased was not being used to improve the Soviet military, but served as a useful diversion of resources away from making tanks etc.
Good paper that deals with facts, and sets the scene of life in the mid-60s.
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00822
That’s not to say bonkers deals didn’t occur. One recalls the subterfuge that went on for the USSR to obtain Toshiba computor equipment, that was subsequently found to be used in the producton of propellors for Soviet submarines. My father recalls, in the mid-80s, when working for a US company selling medical products, his Italian manager getting all excited for securing a sweet deal with the Czechoslovakians, supplying them with desktop computers to be used in hospital laboratories in exchange for 500 tractors ( which had apparently been sat loaded on railway wagons for years). He went to prison for breaking sanctions.
A recent urban myth has started in that Mazdas are made of cheap Chinese steel, on account of the Fukoshima nuclear meltdown. This will undoubtedly be used as the reasons for Mazda rust.
We need to sit in a pub together for a few hours, I feel the discussion would be very interesting. I have history in Germany with Fiat, Lancia and now steel, could be fun. 
1 Like
We test drove both the 30 AE and the Arbarth . They may have come out of the same stable but but they felt worlds apart. The Arbarth felt like it was trying to be a miniature muscle car not a tight nippy roadster, to me personally it just didn’t seem to work one way or another.As soon as I got in the Mx5 ( I had never driven one before) it just felt right, all the things the Arbarth wasn’t , tight, nippy and fun no matter how fast you were going , oh and it was also bright orange .
1 Like
The only “Arbroath” 124 I have heard under acceleration sounded horribly boomy and very loud,very unpleasant actually. I can’t believe it was the factory exhaust, but whatever it was was clearly designed purely to make a racket - cars with turbos don’t naturally have a loud exhaust sound and all sorts of tricks are employed to make them sound ‘sporty’ which is unnatural for such engines - as they have found in F1!
The Abarth in particular seems to be holding its value more than an equivalent MX-5, due to the Abarth being quite rare I guess.
It has the engine from the 500 Abarth, which is proven, and the MX-5 NC gearbox, so more reliable than the ND gearbox.
I think we should be pleased there is another little sports car in the world, as they are a dying breed. Fiat would have never been able to afford it without partnering with Mazda.
4 Likes
I’ll correct myself it’s a Monza exhaust not Cobra. Exhaust is loud but not obnoxious, throaty and deep sounding, almost as if it were straight piped (although of course it is not). Despite the turbo it is just designed to be a good sounding engine, I think they use some valves and other trickery too, though that doesn’t make it unnatural to me, I’d consider that what Audi does with playing exhaust sounds through the cars stereo system. Not to everyone’s taste which is fair enough but I like it, sounds like the cars faster than it is which on todays roads is no bad thing, better than speeding in a car with a powerful engine.
Prices do appear to have stagnated, I suspect they’ll gain a good little following in a similar way to the 500’s. Is a shame it wasn’t profitable for Fiat, as you say, there’s too few of these cars any more.
The Arbarth version of the Fiat 500 also seems to have the same philosophy regarding exhausts, loud and “look at me”. Both pointless IMHO.
1 Like
The Abarth 124 has some kind of trick valve on the exhaust - Opens for more noise and closes for less noise, but apparently they seize quite easily…
Ah! Good old Fiat reliability! 
I quite like that idea…then the rest of us don’t have to hear it:)
I was thinking of a drive I had in an F-type convertible around the time it came out. Just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The chap accompanying me asked me to stop in Thame high street while he went to the bank for some cash.
I’m under no delusions about this sort of thing, and I was fully aware while I waited that none of the Saturday afternoon throng on that lovely summer’s day were casting admiring glances at the handsome silver-haired chap in the brand new bright orange convertible with the top down. Nobody cared. That changed when I started it up amid a horrifying cacophony of programmed spitting and crackling from the exhaust. And then they weren’t admiring glances:)
Though now I think about it, it wasn’t a turbo. Supercharged 3.0 V6 with about 400hp I think. Great fun for about 10 minutes, but then you realise you’ll never be able to give it the beans for more than about 2 seconds at a time…
1 Like