The Fiat Tipo 16v or 'Sedicivalvole' is not a car to be taken lightly, it still remains in my mind as the singularly best sports saloon produced by the manufacturer in recent times. Its evolutionary 16v engine (the culmination of many years of engineering excellence and development) is one of the most mature and yet up-to-date powerplants around, and even now lives on with a different cylinder head in the Twin-Spark range of engines in the Alfa Romeo range. The Sedicivalvole was quite something else, docile in town and fire-breathing animal on the open road, every one of the 150 horsepower on tap always appeared to be working towards the common goal of advancing forwards at an ever increasing rate of knots, how many cars are there around that you can truly say that about ?

Never make the mistake of assuming the 16v is just another Tipo it is a car apart from the main range, almost every area of the car has been enhanced in some way or form to arrive at the end result, its hard to explain without some sort of demonstration but it is (take my word for it) a very good car indeed. As with all Italian cars it made all the right noises but almost to a point where the various noises appeared to have been created to enhance the experience even more. Despite its complexity very little went wrong on this car, it had a few niggling faults that the dealers seemed powerless to rectify, these turned out more to be design faults which should have been ironed out as part of the cars development, somewhat annoyingly.

The Tipo was the subject of my first foray into the world of writing websites and brought a suprising response from all over the world almost from the day I launched it in November 1996, with mailings coming in from South America, the Far East, and right across Europe. As a consequence of administering such a site I learned a great deal more about the car, made new friends and generally suprised people who knew me with what I had done, turning my hobby into something useful for everyone. The site registered over two thousand hits per year while it was running with many viewers coming back for more on a regular basis which is the ultimate accolade as far as website design is concerned. Perhaps even more of an accolade is the fact that it spurred other people on to do the same thing. The power of the Internet should never be underestimated, it is so far reaching that no matter how you try to anticipate the consequences, it will always counter any prediction you make.

Most of my car ownership has been usage as a leisure vehicle and for a great deal of its life the usage of this car was much the same with periods of sometimes a month or even longer between uses becuse of my ever demanding job at the time and company car. This suddenly changed in early '98 when I changed jobs and for the first time ever had to drive myself to work, commuting to Newbury and back a distance of 50 miles per day. This might not sound too bad but for the Tipo it seemed I had found the job that you were'nt supposed to use it for with the fuel consumption running at 25 miles per gallon even if driving the car very lightly indeed a commuter car it certainly was'nt, so, grudgingly I decided to sell it more out of financial pressure (dwindling resources) than out of personal feeling !

Car 20 was the car I owned following the Tipo but the next car was one that I owned as a second car for a while.

Click here to view info on the nineteenth car I owned.
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