There are few cars that manage to look just as much at home scaling an Alpine pass in the Engadin as they do parked in front of a Milanese espresso bar. The original Fiat Panda 4x4, inspired by utilitarian helicopter designs and penned by the maestro Giorgetto Giugiaro in the early 1980s, was one of them. With its boxy, unpretentious silhouette and ingenious packaging, it wasn’t just a car – it was a companion for architects in the Swiss alps, aristocrats in corduroy, and students on Roman side streets. It was, if you will, Italy’s answer to the Land Rover Defender – only smaller, cleverer, and infinitely more charming. Now, in 2025, Fiat is rolling out the new Grande Panda 4x4 – and we find ourselves asking: can it live up to the legend?
First impressions? Fiat hasn’t forgotten where it came from. The design, though more sculpted and digital in detail, tips its hat to the angular honesty of the original Panda. The black plastic cladding and squared-off proportions are more than retro cues; they’re a design language spoken fluently by those who once relied on their Panda 4x4 to make it through the snow to Cortina or down gravel switchbacks in Sardinia without considering paintshop prices. Even the familiar vertical tail lamps are back – albeit in LED. And yet, the Grande Panda is unmistakably of its time. Bigger, broader, and burdened with the expectations of modern crash regulations and hybrid powertrains, it’s more SUV than shoebox. But therein lies the tension. Can something still be a Panda if it’s grande? We would need drive it around some steep mountain passes and narrow Italian villages to properly judge.
Mechanically, the new Panda 4x4 is promising. A hybrid powertrain and electric rear axle promise torque-on-demand for muddy tracks and icy climbs. It’s more refined, more connected, and – let’s be honest – more comfortable than its ancestors ever dared to be. But will it be as fun to sling through the snow? Will it shrug off mountain scratches like a true Panda, or will owners finally worry about the paint?
To answer that, we might look back to one crisp winter day in 2019, when dozens of Panda 4x4s – from factory-fresh Sisleys to patinated Mk1s with dog blankets in the back – gathered in the Alps for the first Classic Driver Panda 4x4 Meet. It was a celebration of the Panda’s peculiar Jetset appeal – not flashy, but somehow still impossibly chic. The kind of car that makes a photographer ditch their Range Rover for something simpler, purer. That kind of emotional equity can’t be manufactured overnight, no matter the badge you put onto a car. It takes a village to raise a child, and a whole community to turn a car into an icon of design.
The new Grande Panda 4x4 may not replace those icons we love, but it could still become a worthy successor. If Fiat leans into its roots – the Giugiaro ethos of functionality, the respect for the car’s cult following, its Jetset utilitarianism – and resists the urge to overthink it, then maybe, just maybe, the legend will live on. Because the Panda was never about horsepower or horsepower ratings. It was about freedom. And a good pair of hiking boots in the back.
