Every week, we’re tracking the values of the most popular classic cars on the UK market. Thanks to our friends at Classic Car Weekly, we can focus on one car and compare its values from 2005 to today – and then anticipate where they will be in 2025. This week, we’re casting a watching eye over the pint-sized Fiat 126, the baby car built to replace the Cinquecento. Classic Car Weekly’s editor David Simister tells the market story of this quirky rear-engined classic’s future growth.
Fiat 126 – The current situation
It’s not unusual for our Price Tracker stories to focus on performance metal and higher-end cars, but in many ways the Fiat 126’s surge in value is even more eye-opening. It doesn’t seem that long ago that you could pick up decent runners for well under a grand, but these days you’d be very lucky to get anything other than a project for that sort of money on the UK market. Nowadays you’d be looking at between £3000-5000 for a decent example – and considerably more for the very best examples.
How times change….
Fiat 126 values – impressive rises in value
We’re tracking Condition 2 examples here, and in this case, there are slim pickings due to rarity in the UK and as you can image, when they turn up at classic car auctions, Fiat 126s can attract a fair bit of attention. The good news is that once you know where to look in order to find one, grabbing a good one isn’t too difficult – just increasingly costly.
Fiat 126 price tracker
This has got a lot to do with prices of its illustrious predecessor, the 500, picking up, which has pulled prices of the better, restored 126s up as buyers priced out of the older cars look for alternatives. The number of survivors is thinner on the ground, too, with many of them now having been restored, driving values up.
Below are the typical prices for a Condition 2 example between 2005-2025.
2005 £900
2010 £1700
2015 £2800
2020 £3500
2025 £5000 (anticipated)
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