Fiat Returning to U.S.

It's been almost 30 years since you could buy a Fiat in the United States but thanks to their investment in Chrysler the Italian car is making a comeback to America.

Did you know that FIAT stands for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino? That's too much to say and it doesn't fit nicely on a name shield either. We haven't seen the Fiat around since Carter was president and like his administration the Fiat had a serious problem with quality and reliability- and much like the Carter administration the brand failed and was sent on it's way.

This time around the automaker is depending on a few factors for it's success. For starters they have returned to being committed to quality and are hoping that younger buyers don't remember the era of bad quality they suffered in the 1970s. They are also going to compete with the Mini Cooper and the Yaris with a price in the middle of the two, coming in at about $17,000 for a midlevel manual transmission.

Fiat seems to also be confident of their target audience and they have been pretty public about the fact that they won't be advertising on television but instead via social and digital media. The CEO of Fiat USA also has been quoted saying, "The people we are targeting tend to live the kinds of lives where they aren't watching a lot of TV anyway."

Another speculation is that Fiat is going after the position that Volkswagen has held as being the hip, young car brand. Fiat has a good chance to be successful in that endeavor as Volkswagen's have been plagued by expensive and frequent problems and less than stellar customer service.

Time will tell if Fiat can make a dent in the US car market.