SPY PICS: Fiat 500 goes al fresco

These are the first pictures of Fiat's upcoming fabric-roof 500 and they reveal what most people believed in the first place: It won't be a full convertible like the Mini or VW Beetle, more a sliding ragtop that maintains essentially the profile of the regular three-door hatch and involves less heavy-duty engineering in the process.

Shot by the master spy photographers at Carparazzi somewhere in suburbia, the pictures clearly indicate that the 'Claytons Cabrio' should lose little to none of the structural rigidity and strength of the hard-top hatch and should be within a similar range of kerb mass figures.

It appears that the 500 cabriolet's roof will fold back, caterpillar-style, right down to the rear window line, leaving only the framework surrounding the side windows and minimising the space behind the seats taken up by the packed-away fabric.

This is a bit like Citroen's Pluriel without the multifarious personality, and revisits the open-roof concept of the original 500.

At one stage Fiat was theorising on a possible 2009 Australian launch but, considering no official word has yet been spoken on a European release for the 500 convertible, that would seem somewhat ambitious. Maybe 2010?

The much anticipated Fiat 500 was introduced in Australia in February 2008 and the production version is almost identical to the Trepiuno concept car first seen at the 2004 Geneva motor show. It is so far the biggest-selling Fiat passenger car in Australia.

-- with Carparazzi