1973 Fiat 128 4 cylinder gas from North America
Summary:
Neat First Car
Faults:
Brake pads needed to be replaced.
All the rear lights would go out and then come back on.
Replaced several starters.
Distributor rotor disintegrated one day as I pulled in to park at the grocery store. Went in, bought a screwdriver, and troubleshot it (no spark? hmmmm...) in the lot. Try doing that with a modern car - course you probably wouldn't need to.
General Comments:
I bought this car from a service buddy - turned out he had gotten it stuck on the ocean beach and it was submerged in sea water, but never bothered to tell me "because I flushed it with clean water afterward". Got rid of it before corrosion started to show up.
Seemed to eat starters, but they were really easy to replace - it was right in the front bottom of the engine. I had such a hard time keeping it so it would start, I got rid of it. For a while, I had a habit of parking it on a hill so I could gravity-start it if/when the starter failed. Looking back, I was buying cheap rebuilt/repainted starters, no surprise they failed.
Neat smalll boxy design. Smelled like a Fiat. Spare tire was under the hood with the engine. Very cool compact engine compartment. It was the first car I'd seen with a transverse engine.
It wouldn't start when it was hot; took me a while to realize the car had a manual choke (!), just like a lawn mower, with the little pull knob on the dashboard. I really liked that once I started using it, it was much cheaper and more fun to operate than a computer.
No a/c, of course, but I didn't miss it.
I learned how to shift on that car, poor thing.
I also learned how to work on cars with that thing. With modern cars, I haven't touched a wrench in ten or fifteen years, but I did a lot of work on that thing back in the day.
Really neat car. I miss it, although at the time I couldn't get rid of it fast enough. Sold it to a buddy for $150, and told him about all the problems. He managed to keep it running for a few years at least.
Would you buy another car from this manufacturer? Don't Know
Review Date: 3rd November, 2006
19th Sep 2007, 15:05
I purchased a 73 128SL new and was very disappointed with it. It shed it's exhuast system 3 times. At 38,000 miles the cam timing belt broke. This jammed a valve into a piston, breaking the crown. The piston crown rotated and punched the broken valve stem up thru the head. Since the valve stem would not compress, the force bent a rod and broke the crankshaft. This was just after Fiat abandoned the US market. The car was sold for scrap.