‘There are easier ways to get up
Etna’
Somewhat inevitably, there’s a dark green
first-generation Panda 4x4 at the bottom of the mountain. It’s the Sisley
special edition, still wearing the Steyr-Puch badges. Fondness swells. It’s
tiny, with tires barely a hand span wide, and so tinny and basic it could have
come free with a box of Sicilian cereal. But there are lots of cues that point
at the latest version, and it exudes the kind of straight-edged, fuss-free
charm it’s impossible to engineer with modern, crash-safe cars. A brief
conversation with the owner, and it turns out this Panda has covered 380,000km
on its original engine. Actually, no one really knows how far it’s been,
because for “some years” in the Nineties, the speedo was broken.
There are, of course, easier ways to get up
Mount Etna than Panda-based transport. There’s a cable car that can take you
about two-thirds of the way though you still have to hike the last bit to get
to the very top or off-road buses that can deliver you to a point at the base
of the biggest caldera. The ‘buses’ are serious bits of off-road kit, based as
they are on the Mercedes Unimog, and the Fiat seems comprehensively outgunned
parked next to one, which, again, doesn’t augur particularly cheerfully.
There
are, of course, easier ways to get up Mount Etna than Panda-based transport.
It’s not too long before we realize why the
Etna taxi service needs such hardcore rigs. The ‘road’ up the side of Etna is
basically a track bulldozed along the line of least resistance. So it meanders
like an old man’s conversation: a series of switchbacks here and there, a long
straight bit, a few sweeping curves and a smattering of spurs that lead to
vertiginous dead ends. There are no barriers, and the lava that surrounds them
is as sharp as wit. Walk around on the stuff, and you realize that it’s like
balancing on the remains of a bonfire. While some is crunchy and brittle, the
bits that don’t crunch into powder feel like coral, all sharp and fossilized.
If you fall over, it hurts. I know. I fell over. It looked like I’d been
trapped in a sacksful of angry cats.
The Panda doesn’t grind its way up the
slopes like a traditional 4x4, but scampers. First gear is deliberately low to
negate the need for a separate and mostly redundant low-ratio gearbox, and
second requires a little speed to prevent bogging down, so the little car
bounds up the slopes, bouncing and clawing at the loose surface. But the Panda
is small and relatively light, and leaves no trace of its passing, apart from
disturbing the foggy cloud that cloaks this level of the Etna landscape. Except
the weirdly humid and wispy cloud cover isn’t cloud at all. It’s steam. As we
climb higher, the temperature drops, and it becomes obvious that what we
assumed was low-level cumulus is actually vapor rising from the floor. The
Earth’s magma blood runs hot and close here. The sandy, rocky ground is
jet-black cooled lava, bracketed by patches of snow. There is blood-warm steam
everywhere, and deep-fried crispy terra underfoot. But again, stark as it is,
it’s got a kind of grim charm. A strain of violent grace. But it’s the kind of
beauty that makes you nervous. The kind of beauty in the potential of, say, a
mountain shaped grenade.
There
are no barriers, and the lava that surrounds them is as sharp as wit. Walk
around on the stuff, and you realize that it’s like balancing on the remains of
a bonfire.
Slowly, we went our way up the track, the
lava gradually blanketed by purest white snow. The Panda flickers its traction
control and differential lights for the Haldex clutch repeatedly, the blinking
yellow eye indicating increased severity, even though it’s hard to detect in
the cabin. Still we keep going. The scenery has gone full post-apocalyptic, the
charred remains of bits of houses poking out from under smoking sand, the rocks
shocked into harsh shapes. The Panda looks soft and round and terribly
vulnerable up here.
Slowly,
we went our way up the track, the lava gradually blanketed by purest white
snow.
Eventually, we get to the point where the
World’s Toughest Tour Buses give up and turn around, and only walking trails
remain. Trails guarded by large rocks hefted into position to prevent vehicles
from going any further. Except they were not prepared for a car just over five
feet wide, and I manage to squeeze the Panda between the barriers and head up
toward the ridgeline of the caldera. We are now on hiking trails barely the
Panda’s width, sometimes on snow, sometimes on that gently steaming black sand.
A spooky situation. No other 4x4 could get here, because not even the most
hardcore SUV could have inveigled itself into the position a humble little Fiat
has managed, for the simple reason they would fall off the side and die. I’m
not going to think about that for a little while.
We
get to the point where the World’s Toughest Tour Buses give up and turn around,
and only walking trails remain.
The going is getting increasingly tough
though, and the Panda requires higher revs to maintain forward momentum, the
occasions we resort to the low first gear to claim supremacy over lumps getting
ever more frequent. The hard-packed lava sand is easy enough to find purchase
on, but as soon as we try to traverse the snowy bits or the looser lava marbles
with the steam rising between them – the Panda’s skinny tires start to cut into
the surface rather than float over it. With only 75bhp and 145Nm of torque to
play with, and the thinning atmosphere adding an asthmatic intake of oxygen,
eventually we hit a deep patch of snow, the Panda bogs and huffs to a stop.
Only 100ft from the ridge line and a victory of sorts.
The
going is getting increasingly tough though, and the Panda requires higher revs
to maintain forward momentum
We try to dig the car further up, but every
time the 4x4 engages to try to lift the car higher, the lack of grip and
meaningful torque from low enough in the rev range means that the Panda is
sucked to a dead stop. Well, the torque issue and the clutch smoke pouring out
of the bonnet after one particularly vigorous effort. After what seems like an
age, we dig the Panda out of its resting place and happily canter off back down
Mount Etna with blessed relief. There’s a sense of pregnancy about Etna, of
bloat and indigestion, and it’s making the hairs on the back of my neck stand
up. But after a bit, I decide that I’m imagining it, and we stop to take a
final few pictures.
I stare back up the steep, gravelly slopes
and realize that the Panda 4x4, this little 15-grand hatchback, has taken us
further than any of the big, expensive SUVs could have possibly hoped. Up a
living volcano. It may be a small car, but it has a huge heart. Sometime later,
we pad down the hill, send the Panda home and retire to the airport, convinced
that the feeling of portent leaking from Etna was all in our imagination.
We were – of course – wrong. As we boarded
our plane home, Mount Etna erupted, spewing a small trickle of molten lava down
the side of the mountain a couple of hundred feet from where we were stuck.
Which goes to prove two things: one, that Pandas always fare better out in the
wild and two, that the bit about avoiding smoking mountains remains terribly
good advice.
A
Fiat Panda 4x4... up Mount Etna
Original vs new
The first Panda 4x4 appeared in 1983 (the
Panda itself was first introduced in 1980), and came with hardware supplied by
Steyr Puch. The Austrian company provided the entire drivetrain, and the Panda
became the first properly small, transverse engined car to get a 4x4 system in
mass production. It had a 965cc four-pot with 48bhp originally based on the
engine from the Autobianchi A112, and later in its life became the subject of
several special editions like this Sisley variant...
