Blunder Buses: Fiat Stilo

Building cars is like betting, sometimes on the grandest of scales. The bet, as with any business, is on whether your investment in a product or idea will bring you a return, ideally a fat one.

Fat returns are hard won in the car industry, a margin of eight per cent on your turnover considered an excellent result among the volume players. A margin of half that might nevertheless harvest you huge quantities of cash, the sheer number of vehicles you sell bringing in heaps of the stuff, assuming you can sell said car at the right price and the right rate.

Such thoughts were in the mind of one Roberto Testore at the turn of century, the Fiat Auto CEO masterminding the launch of a new small family hatchback to replace the ageing Bravo and Brava. It would take on the VW Golf in particular, the Ford Focus, Vauxhall Astra, Peugeot 307, Renault Megane and the rest in general.