This Wild Fiat Might Be The World's Thinnest Car - Here's How It Works Under The Hood

Fiat makes some seriously small automobiles. Take, for example, its line of 500 series cars. Or the new for 2025 Topolino Vilebrequin. Then you have the Panda, which sold over 110,000 in Italy in 2021 alone, making it that country's best-selling car. Never heard of it? That's not surprising, considering during that same year, the Italian carmaker sold a grand total of just 1,707 vehicles in the United States and a mere 65 in Canada.

Although you can technically buy a Panda here in the U.S., you might not want to. We only mention the Panda because knowing that it's a vibrantly sold iconic compact vehicle in Europe will help you understand why Italian Andrea Marazzi (who happens to work as a mechanic at his family's scrapyard and workshop in Bagnolo Cremasco) chose that particular model and did something quite remarkable to it — he made it even smaller than it already was. Actually, he made it thinner. It's so skinny, in fact, that most people wouldn't even fit inside because Marazzi's Panda is a mere 19.7 inches wide. Why so narrow? Well, he simply wanted to see if he could build a car that was only as wide as himself. 

So, he took his measurements, found a 1993 Panda, and went to work slicing and dicing. After a year's worth of painstaking patience, numerous cuts and welds, more than a few mistakes, and lots of laughter, Marazzi finished his pet project and was left with what amounted to "the world's tightest panda."

This skinny Panda weighs less than 600 pounds. In comparison, even the smallest Panda produced by Fiat (an acronym for "Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino") weighs just shy of 1,896 pounds. Working at his family scrapyard as a mechanic gave Marazzi the tools and knowledge to split the vehicle vertically, making it about one-third the width of the original.

Shrinking down the body or trimming the original manufacturer's interior parts (such as the seats, fabric, and dashboard) wasn't the biggest issue. Figuring out the power supply was because the original inline 4-cylinder was obviously too large to fit. Marazzi finally settled on hooking a 24V battery to a small electric motor taken from an e-scooter. This allowed it to roll along at a top speed of nine miles per hour with a driving range of about 15.5 miles. It has just one headlight and two tiny indicators (also original). The transmission is connected to the original left rear tire while the brake goes to the original right rear tire, and the steering controls are in front. For the most part, it functions exactly like a normal automobile but is clearly not street-legal.

Marazzi showcased the build on social media and debuted it at "Panda in Pandino," a festival held at Visconti Castle in Italy each year for Panda aficionados. Happy with how it turned out, he submitted it to Guinness World Records as the slimmest functioning vehicle ever made. As of this writing, Guinness has not made it official, but we may one day see it there.