The new Fiat 500e is more spacious than before, offers more features and better refinement, comes with more power and also adds a significantly longer range compared to the first-generation 500e. It’s also one of the least expensive electric vehicles that you can buy new. Unfortunately for Fiat’s sales department, it’s still a tiny two-door with about 150 miles of range, so in America that’s going to be a hard sell — and so far, it has been. Fiat’s solution? Cheaper leases.
Now, if you remember back when the old Fiat 500e hit the market, you could get leases scarily cheap. We’re talking “$1,000 down and $83 a month” cheap. That’s not quite the case anymore, but CarsDirect reports you can now lease a 2024 500e for $199 a month with $2,999 down. That payment is calculated using a price of $34,095 and 7,500 miles of driving per year, and it works out to about $282 per month in total. That’s significantly less than the effective total of $437 a month that Fiat previously wanted previously.
If you regularly need to drive more than 150 miles, the 500e probably isn’t going to be a great choice no matter how cheap it is, but if you mostly just need to drive around town and occasionally head into the big city? As long as you have a reliable place to charge, you should be good to go. Well, unless you need more room than the 500e provides. I found the rear seat more spacious than the old one, but I also won’t blame you if you don’t want to deal with finagling your baby into the back seat.
And yet, if it does fit with your lifestyle, and the cost of insurance isn’t too high, this is starting to look like a heck of a deal. Maybe possibly even too good of a deal for me to personally pass up. Did I maybe text my brother a VIN and my driver’s license number while I was writing this post to see what kind of rate he could get me? Absolutely. Is it a done deal? We’ll see how much insurance is going to be. It’s not a no, though.