I Think I Should Remind You That Fiat Once Made A Smaller, Fancier Hummer

I’m guessing that when people think about Fiat, they tend to not think about High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, also known as HMMWVs or, more commonly, Humvees or Hummers, and there’s two reasons for that: 1. Fiat never made Humvees, and 2. why would you? They’re Humvees! But that doesn’t mean we should be counting Fiat out when it comes to at least having the ability to build something like a Hummer, because they sort of did that, once, back in the heady days of 2005, an era before the iPhone, back when people were saying “boom goes the dynamite” and Fiat showed this remarkably Hummer-like machine at the Bologna Auto Show.

The vehicle was called the Oltre, which seems to be Italian for “more than” which sort of fits this thing, at least in the context of the English meaning of “too much” or “overdone,” because, damn, this thing sure as hell was. Remember, this came out in 2005, right around the time when companies like GM and Mercedes-Benz realized that some people really wanted to drive blinged-out SUVs that sort of pretended to be military vehicles, like the Hummer H2 or the over-chromed variants of the G-Wagen. The Oltre feels like a product of this era.

You know what else came out in 2005? This Madonna song, Hung Up:

This doesn’t really have anything to do with Hummers or Fiats or anything like that, though a Chevy Caprice taxi does turn into a London Black Cab at one point, kind of. I just thought you might enjoy that. There’s parkour in there, too.

But let’s get back to the Oltre. And yes, I believe that round thing is, in fact, a roof hatch.

The Oltre was actually based on an actual military vehicle, unlike the Hummer H2 but I suppose like the Benz G-Wagen; in the case of the Oltre, that vehicle was an Iveco LMV (Light Multirole Vehicle), a flexible, multi-use truck used in a number of military organizations across the globe.

The Oltre show car had a body heavily modified from the Iveco LMV, but you could definitely still see the bones of its donor there, especially in the overall proportions, door shapes, and details like those door handles.

Look at those Cinquecento taillights!

The whole look, though, was transformed into something else, a very specific sort of aesthetic that got its start among Hummers and G-Wagens and continues to the present day in what companies like Rezvani build and sell.

It’s an aesthetic that combines, somewhat paradoxically, the rugged utilitarianism of a military off-road vehicle with a certain kind of oligarch-chic opulence. There’s lots of chrome and pearlescent white paint, impeccably clean surfaces and fastidious detailing, luxurious, even decadent materials inside and out, making a vehicle that seems both quite capable of handling almost any difficult situation while simultaneously being almost guaranteed to never be in any situation more challenging than driving between a parked Bentley and a marble fountain while trying not to spill an Aperol Spritz on white pants.

Look at this interior! It feels sort of like a powerboat? Maybe because of the color scheme and half-assedness of the control layout. Look at that bank of switches! It looks like a video mixer is mounted vertically there. Also, that huge center console divides the cabin pretty dramatically, limiting contact between passenger and driver, which severely limits fingerblasting/jerking-offotunities, something that I would have assumed would be a deal-breaker for the target market of this machine. Maybe that’s why it never went into production.

The whole look and feel and tone of the Oltre is an extremely showy sort of look, designed to telegraph the ideas of wealth and power, and contains within it deep and complex reserves of insecurity. It’s a look and overall aesthetic that I think many of us associate with, um, assholes.

The Instagram account Obscure Cars Daily I think described it quite wonderfully:

 

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“This variant is just tweaked for the sort of miscreant fucklebiscuit who fancies a walrus tusk shifter and a manatee-skin dashboard for hoovering some flake upon. Probably requested the skin be sourced from the rectum, too, that sick son of a bitch.”

I can’t really put it any better than that, so I’ll just thank Obscure Cars Daily for putting it so well, especially “miscreant fucklebiscuit.”

Mechanically, this was all Iveco, with a 3-liter inline-four turbodiesel making just 182 horsepower, but a no-joke 336 pound-feet of torque. Fiat claimed this thing could climb an 80% longitudinal gradient – you know, like a driving up a really steep hill. That’s pretty damn good. It had a top speed of 81 mph, the same as a 1973 VW Beetle, but this thing weighed like 7,000 pounds! That’s more than the Hummer H2 (6,400 lbs) and a G-Wagen (5,600 lbs or so) but less than a Hummer H1 (about 7,500 pounds).

The Oltre never made it to production, as you’re probably aware, and I’m not really sure the world is that much poorer as a result. But it is worth noting that Fiat did manage to make such a vehicle, and they seemed to have done a very credible job at it, for what it is. I really like to see a carmaker branching out into areas we don’t normally associate with them, which this absolutely seemed to be.

There was only one Oltre ever built, and that was probably enough. But I’m glad at least one exists.

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