If The ‘Hot Hatch’ Revival Is Real, Should We Pair A New Omni GLH With A Forgotten Fiat?

You’re walking into an out-of-town Shakey’s Pizza, and the host suddenly jumps up like you’re on fire. “Are … are you Jason Torchinsky?” She looks painfully excited, and you don’t know why she imagines you’re one of the founders of the Autopian. You open your mouth to correct her, and before you can even get a word out she’s taking you to the best table in the house, overlooking the parking lot and with a nice fake Tiffany lamp. “I’ll bring you a pitcher of Diet Coke since I know that’s your favorite, and a few choices of beer, sir, on the house of course for a celebrity like yourself”. Why the hell does she think you’re someone you’re not?

It gets worse; just as you’re about to talk again the server comes up with a dog-eared copy of Max Hardigrew Car Mysteries for you to sign. “It would mean so much to me, sir, since your writing has changed my life.”  Once more, you try to set them both straight when a plate of free Shakey’s cheesy bread shows up at the table. What the hell: you grab a pen and write “Keep Smiling, All The Best, Torch” on the inside cover. Pathetic, I know, but free food is free food, right?

A similar situation to the above seems to have happened recently in the automotive world. Electric vehicle maker Rivian just previewed two new vehicles, the scaled-down version of the current model called the R2 and an even smaller entry called the R3. The latter has inexplicably set the social media world on fire; featuring a flat, angled backlight and a thick, upright “C” pillar, it has journalists falling all over themselves to be the first to declare that it’s the “rebirth of the hot hatch” or at the very least “the return of the hatchback”.

The only problem: it isn’t, or at least not really. That’s the opinion we’ve floated, and I don’t doubt that the designers of the R3 themselves might likely agree, but it’s to no avail. Lewin has written about people on the street losing their shit in the presence of the thing, and the whole reincarnation-of-the-Lancia-Delta narrative is likely something the Rivian marketing department is eating up and not interested in correcting any time soon. Publicity is publicity, after all.

My takeaway is twofold. First, people will see what they want to see and disregard the truth, but maybe it’s fine to let them be wrong. If they imagine the R3 as a new Mark 1 Golf for some reason and want to drop forty thousand on one because of that, why stop them? Second, it tells me that a new “hot hatch” craze might be happening; cars from the fifties were popular with collectors in the nineties (note the 1991 Nissan Pike vehicles) and now early eighties wallpaper cars could do the same thing (and yes, that makes me feel very, very old).

There’s a lot of buzz about the reimagined Renault 5 (Le Car in the US) now, and I felt like I tapped into some of this energy a few months back when I spent a few evenings scribbling up a modern EV version of the rare, underrated Shelby Dodge Omni GLH-S. Based on the comments, this waste of my time was surprisingly quite a crowd-pleaser. And while The Autopian is just a small subset of car buyers, I think that as a focus group for enthusiasts, it is probably a pretty good bellwether for success.

So the other day I asked Jason: what car should we redo to capitalize on this possible trend? His answer surprised me; I’ve seen a few revival renderings of this machine he chose online but none have captured the spirit of the original. Looks like we should give it a shot.

Recently, I seem to be sketching up a lot of proposals for Stellantis vehicles, and there are reasons for that. It would be nice to see some of their cars doing better in the American market, especially since they have a great history of building some intriguing machines.

Like all of the Big Three, Stellantis isn’t afraid to share platforms and sell similar (or even nearly identical) cars under different brands. The latest Dodge Hornet and Alfa Tonale are kissing cousins, and the American-branded version is not exactly setting the world on fire. An Alfa Romeo and a Dodge as essentially rebadged cars?  I know it’s been over a decade of this now, but if I had done this as one of my stupid “what if’s” about twenty years ago you would have told me that I’m full of shit even more than you do now. Honestly, you’d be a fool to believe that such a travesty would ever happen.

If that Dodge GLH concept that I floated really would be a success, I see no reason why they wouldn’t want to make a modified version of this EV for another Stellantis nameplate that wouldn’t be quite as much of a hotrod. I’m imagining something still sporting but more mainstream-oriented for those who don’t necessarily want to Go Like Hell; they might just want to Go In Comfort. The car that Jason suggested reviving – the Fiat Ritmo – might inexplicably be the answer.

The Ritmo was a VW Golf-sized-and-shaped two or four-door hatchback; Fiat’s entry into this hotly contested category of the late seventies. The car was sold as the Fiat Strada in the US, where it received the expected add-on bumpers-over-the-bumpers:

While the Strada was heaven-sent for the 1979 energy crisis the claimed mechanical or electrical issues with the car and, more importantly, the American dealer’s inability to correct them put paid the model (and the brand itself) on this side of the pond by 1982. You might remember this period road test video where the TV crew needs to push start the car because of a parasitic power loss on the brand-new test car, which the dealer inexplicably tried to remedy by putting in two or three new batteries (the same dealer that delivered the car to the testers with a crooked steering wheel). That’s like saying “I poured in five more gallons and it’s STILL leaking!”

Regardless of the reliability issues real or imagined, it’s the styling that makes the Ritmo/Strada such a standout.  You can see some of the competitors assembled below; Jason opined some time ago that the Ritmo was arguably the nicest looking of the hatches available at the turn of the decade in 1980, and he has a point:

The Ritmo was really quite avant-garde and could almost have been a concept car.  Let’s take a closer look and compare it to the Mark I Golf for example:

First of all, where the Volkswagen looks rather heavy and slab-sided, the Ritmo has a crease line running around the whole car, and the body below that line tapers in on all four sides as if you’ve wrapped a rope around the bottom and pulled it tight (there’s even a slight shadow-throwing undercut just below that line that many an example obscures with add-on Pep Boys rub strips). Somehow it makes the car seem to look lighter. That crease line even bisects the round headlamps to somehow give the illusion of making the frontal area appear lower than the Golf, which it isn’t.

What’s also great is that, like many cars of this era, the thing was available in actual colors and not just fifty shades of grey. You get metallic shades like terra cotta but also things like a blue and red that appeared to be faded after years of sitting in the sun despite having left the paint booth with that color from brand new.

The look is really an order of magnitude beyond the clunky old competitors like that Chevy Shove-It and Toyota Starlet, and a step beyond that Golf and the Golf rip-off Omni/Horizon. Honestly, the more I looked at it, the Ritmo seemed to be ahead of its time in that some of the things it was trying to do could not be done with the materials of the day. With today’s technology, we can fix that.

The GLH was supposed to be a tough little fighter with the performance of a neo-supercar, but for my Tonale/Hornet style twin of that car, I wanted to make a version that is something the GLH revival and that IONIQ 5 isn’t: friendly looking!

I still find much of the detailing on the IONIQ a bit contrived and likely to make it quickly appear as dated as a Tiburon coupe looks today, but it’s up front where I find it most objectionable. Why so mean-looking? What’s making cars so angry still today?  Even that all-new Renault 5 (and some upcoming Mini models we’ve seen sneak peeks of) somehow ended up with an aggressive face, or at least one that’s decidedly not cute.

The one feature about Rivians that is likely capturing people are the amiable-robot eyes, a humanized good-hearted machine unlike the evil ones Dennis DeYoung forced his band to sing about. Surprise of surprises- the old Ritmo has such a face; the kind of look that can greet you in the parking lot after a shitty day at work and say “hey, let’s have some fun!”  Now look at this mug:

Well, such a visage was created with sealed-beam-looking round lights that we’ll replace with Rivian-style circular units surrounded by glowing frames that act as white daytime running light rings; these can blink amber as turn signals. the Ritmo’s mid-body-level split line will come in handy here since that will form the frunk opening and provide a welcome low liftover.  You know that grey material the original Ritmo used for the bumper areas? Not needed here; we can do body-colored flexible panels that really capture the clean shape we might surmise that the original designers might have had in mind had it been readily available to them. Here you can see the new Ritmo/Strada with its twin brother:

Here’s one thing the new Ritmo will reintroduce from the original: the prominent round door handles! Why try to poorly hide these things or make them some flush contraption that looks clean but you have to pound on with a fist after an ice storm to get in your car as on most modern vehicles? I somehow remember reading that the Nissan designer responsible for the rather ornate handles on the 1990 Infiniti Q45 said that these were an important tactile part of the car, like the knob on the front door of your house. He was right: stop downplaying it!

Taillights are integrated into the body-colored bumpers as they were on the grey-bumpered original. Odd how the chamfered-edge rear window on the original (which I’ve retained here) predated that hip design detail by four decades.

The Ritmo/Strada offered a two-door model as well; overseas a performance Abarth version and even a convertible with a weird trunk opening were sold. Certainly, I can’t resist the urge to make one of those as well.  For the open roof, though, I want to do something different with the top. I’ve proposed a motorized multi-section system that folds onto itself and piles up on top of the roof section connecting the “C” pillars that remain.

The rear window electrically lowers into the tailgate for open air motoring and to access the trunk; the tailgate can then pivot down for even more access or to carry larger items.

Why not use the same dual motor drivetrain as the Dodge GLH model for yet another sleeper performance car to embarrass “sports” cars? As an Abarth it will need to have noise generators to make the sound of a real performance Fiat getting an “Italian tune-up”.  No, just kidding, that would be idiotic. Who the hell would do that?

Stellantis doesn’t seem to have a problem with keeping the interiors of their platform-shared cars rather similar in an unfortunate Aries/Reliant manner, as the Hornet/Tonale cabins seem to show.

While we’ll begrudgingly do the same thing with the Strada/GLH, I insist on adding a few twists to capture the personality of the Fiat. Though not as extreme as the exterior design, the original Ritmo/Strada’s interior had an angular modernist look to it, but like the exterior there were some small details that were unexpected and rather delightful.

Can you think of another car that substituted standard rocker switches with things that looked like the heads of croquet mallets for gnomes? Despite the appearance of being two buttons it’s just ends of the same rocker switch:

The GLH and Strada/Ritmo will share a common structure, but the round air vents (in the same apertures) will replace the square ones of the Dodge. Also, the deeply hooded gauge cluster and “L” stick shifter are gone, replaced by the croquet mallet buttons and the double-stripe-with-rounded ends motif from the Ritmo alloy wheels on the seats, door panels, and my strange “butt crack” steering wheel with little “wings” to house the fingertip buttons for the radio and such. All just enough to give more distinctive character to the Fiat and Dodge, even if it’s a lot of the same damn thing.

Most examples of the Ritmo/Strada have likely evaporated from the face of the earth. I haven’t seen one in the US in at least thirty years; the UK site “How Many Left” lists 25 as still registered in some shape or form which is more than I thought would exist but still a handful. It’s obvious to me that this car was so overlooked that releasing an updated version would result in something that would seem “all new” to many buyers, especially with the manufacturing capabilities today that better suit the design.

Regardless of if you’re screaming like a fifth grader at a Taylor Swift concert or if it’s making you cringe, the “hot hatch” revival is something that is happening. You know that there will be some (likely poorly done) “tribute” models introduced, and if we’re going to do the damn nostalgia thing you know that I want to at least use something more obscure than the same damn three or four likely suspects we’ll see exhumed (is the Escort XR3 next?). This little Ritmo is worthy of more respect than it’s received. As with some early albums from bands being ignored until years later when they make it big I think this deep cut deserves a second spin.