The Fiat Topolino tops out at 25 mph. Someone looked at that and thought, “Let’s make a racing barchetta out of it.”
GFG Style, the design house founded by Giorgetto Giugiaro and his son Fabrizio, has unveiled two concepts based on the pint-sized electric quadricycle. The Top. L is a roofless, windshield-chopped riff on a vintage racing barchetta. The Top. J is a four-seat beach car channeling the 1960s Fiat Jolly.
Neither is any faster than the original. Both are delightfully absurd.
The Top. L starts with the already doorless Dolcevita version of the Topolino, strips the roof entirely, and slices the windshield down to a vestigial nub. The interior gets aquamarine leather and Alcantara. Press photos show a helmeted driver in a blue racing suit behind the wheel, which is either a brilliant joke or a deeply committed bit of cosplay for a vehicle that couldn’t outrun a bicycle in a school zone.
Giugiaro, now 87, remains the most prolific car designer alive. The DeLorean DMC-12, the original VW Golf, the Maserati Ghibli, the BMW M1. Applying that pedigree to a 25 mph city pod feels like hiring a Michelin-starred chef to work a lemonade stand, and yet there’s something charming about the lack of pretension.
The Top. J is the more practical concept, if that word applies here. Inspired by the original Fiat Jolly beach cars that wealthy Italians once kept stowed on their yachts, it adds a canvas roof and terry cloth seats. The trunk disappears in favor of a rear bench, turning the Topolino into an impromptu four-seater for shuttling guests from dock to dinner.
Wicker seats would have been the purist choice, but terry cloth at least makes sense after a swim.
Lapo Elkann is also involved in the project, a detail that adds a layer of Stellantis family politics. Lapo is the brother of John Elkann, the current Stellantis chairman. Whether these concepts are a vanity project, a brand-building exercise, or a genuine attempt to gauge interest in Topolino variants is unclear, but probably all three.
The Topolino itself has been quietly carving out a niche in the U.S. as a golf cart alternative in gated communities and beach towns, priced under $15,000. A Low Speed Vehicle kit for American-spec models is coming soon, capping the car at 25 mph to comply with federal LSV regulations. It fills a gap that traditional automakers have largely ignored, the last-mile, low-speed runabout for people who want something that doesn’t look like it belongs on the back nine.
There is a cautionary tale buried in these concepts. A few years ago, someone rented a Citroën Ami, the Topolino’s corporate twin under Stellantis, and flung it around the famous hairpin at the Monaco Grand Prix circuit. It rolled. The laws of physics do not care about your design pedigree or your aquamarine Alcantara.
GFG Style says both concepts are flights of fancy with no production plans. But the four-seat beach car idea has obvious commercial logic, and the attention these renders generate is worth more than the design hours they consumed. Fiat has been teasing expanded Topolino variants for months now, and concepts like these tend to test the water before anyone commits tooling dollars.
The real question is whether Stellantis sees the Topolino as a curiosity or a platform. At 25 mph, the ceiling is low. But the floor keeps getting more interesting.
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