Should Fiat Build This Electric Reinterpretation Of The Multipla?

The Fiat Multipla was a brilliantly clever, practical bit of family transport, with its unusual and highly adaptable three-abreast front seating layout and innovative spaceframe construction. That’s not really why people remember it, though.

The only reason it tends to come up in conversation these days is its mad, bubbly styling. With its bulbous, two-tiered face; high-beam lights set in below the windscreen; and pinched beltline, it always divided opinions like a yeast-based spread of some sort (at least until a 2004 facelift made it something far worse than ugly: boring). Even its designer, Roberto Giolito, has acknowledged this in the past.

The thing is, though, the automotive nostalgia cycle has come right back round to the ’90s, with a new appreciation for the colourful, carefree and quirky machines that simply couldn’t exist in today’s ever-so-slightly stuffy car industry.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Multipla is starting to get some attention again, leading Italian designer and renderer Marco Maltese to show off his modern reimagining of the MPV, a design he coins ‘Re.Multipla’.

Maltese has leaned into the Multipla’s styling eccentricities, exaggerating as well as modernising them. The pinched waistline, for instance, is much more pronounced, making it appear as if the car’s greenhouse is floating above the lower body. The characteristic high-mounted lights have been replaced by a bang-on-trend ultra slim LED bar, while the bubbly front and rear lights have been given a similar minimalist treatment, the fronts now raised, halo-like, from the body.

Elsewhere, Maltese has sympathetically updated the design, with big three-spoke aero wheels and central door handles that hint at rear-opening or sliding doors. Most notably, he envisions Re.Multipla with an electric drivetrain, something that Fiat’s parent company, Stellantis, has plenty of experience with.

It seems that the old-fashioned people carrier has pretty much had its day, so we wouldn’t bet on Fiat ever doing something like this for real, especially since Re.Multipla is just an unofficial fan rendering.

Much like Renault’s recent Twingo EV concept, though, which is very much planned for production, it’s giving us all sorts of warm, fuzzy ’90s nostalgia. Would you like to see Fiat bring back the Multipla?