Fiat Mio is the radicalization of a tendency that Fiat has always practiced: to listen to the people attentively.
The difference this time, aside from the objective of creating a concept car, was the transparency and the reach of the project. Millions of participants were able, not only to express ideas and needs about a car, but also to follow step by step how this collaborative process ended up integrating the way the people work at Fiat. The initiative flies in the face of conventional car design, which is usually fine-tuned behind closed doors to prevent competitors from stealing ideas.
The project was launched a year ago with an online hub found at www.fiatmio.cc. People were invited to submit design ideas for the car, whose name translates as My Fiat. Since then, all suggestions have been discussed by others and the best ideas have been trialled by the Fiat design team, along with its own engineers’ ideas. So far more than 11,000 ideas have been submitted by a registered community of almost 17,000 members.
Submissions include an idea to have wheels that rotate 90 degrees to allow for easier parallel parking; cameras instead of rear-view mirrors and inter-vehicle communication to avoid collision.