Fiat Pandas

At the moment, the 270,000 Fiat Pandas which are built each year are constructed at Fiat's Polish plant. But part of proposed plans to restructure the company could see building of the Panda take place in Italy.

The proposal is to shift half of production to the Pomigliano d'Arco plant near Naples in southern Italy. It's currently used for more expensive Fiat and Alfa Romeo models.

Which means in the future you could have a 50-50 chance of getting an Italian-made Fiat Panda.

I just stumbled on a nice blog post discussing the old style Fiat Panda, and how it has remained popular for residents of hillside towns in Italy as it's one of the few cars that can fit in the narrow streets. You can read it for yourself at 2 Italy - We moved to Italy.

Meanwhile fans of the new version might like this modified example found via Flickr:

The image is by _najt, and it's used under a Creative Commons licence.