Fiat Doblo 1.3 16v Multijet Car Review

Facts At A Glance
Car: Fiat Doblo 1.3 Multijet range
Prices: £12,150-£13,025 – on the road INSURANCE GROUPS: 4-5
Emissions: 145g/km
Performance: 0-60mph 16.4s / Max Speed 97mph
Fuel Consumption: [urban] 42.2mpg / [extra urban] 58.9mpg / [combined] 51.4mpg
Safety: Twin airbags / 3-point seatbelts
Dimensions: Length/Width/Height 4159/1714/1800mm

ARE WE THERE JET?

Our Rating: 5.1 / 10

Fiat’s Doblo 1.3 Multijet models are a great way of moving the family about cheaply and without any undue aggravation. Steve Walker reports…

Let’s face it, life with a young family can, sometimes, become a little bit trying. No matter how plausibly adoring parents radiate happiness as they regale you with details of their adorable offspring’s first words, steps, teeth or hair, you always suspect that behind the façade they’re absolutely cream-crackered. So why make things more taxing than they already are? Fiat’s Doblo 1.3 Multijet is a simple vehicle designed to eliminate some of the hassle from family life so that parents and kids can get on with enjoying the good stuff.

Sleepless nights, dirty nappies, temper tantrums, seemingly endless expense, people with growing families have enough to struggle through without a vehicle that’s ill-suited to their needs. With the Doblo MPV, Fiat have addressed the problem by breaking down the modern family’s requirements for space, durability and affordability to their basic levels. They’ve stripped away the superfluities found on many so-called family vehicles (the stuff that’s largely there just to make dad feel better about getting behind the wheel) and the result is the Doblo - a simple, functional, light, airy, playpen on wheels.

Actually, forget all that. The Fiat Doblo is essentially just a van with seats but that’s its genius. You’d think that family MPVs and commercial vehicles would be designed with two very different sets of criteria in mind but the Doblo is proof that one basic model can fulfil both purposes. The Doblo Cargo van has space to move bulky items around, wide access points for easy loading and unloading, tough interior trim designed to stand up to the rigours of the daily grind and economical engines like Fiat’s 1.3-litre Multijet diesel to keep running costs down. The Doblo MPV, which is very similar in its make-up to the Cargo, benefits from the same cavernous interior space that can be used to seat five or seven people while leaving room for luggage as well.

There’s masses of headroom, creating a fresh airiness that reduces the likelihood of children getting cramped and irritable. The sliding side doors and huge tailgate all open wide, creating excellent access for getting kids in and out, doing up their seatbelts, fixing car seats in place and stowing bikes or pushchairs. Every parent knows that children have a spooky in-built capacity for making a pigsty of a car in minutes but the Doblo’s basic and tough commercial vehicle design means the trim should stand-up well to little fingers pulling it, scratching it and colouring it in with crayons.

Then we come to the engine. Just as vans must be reliable and cost-effective to run so as to avoid eating into a business’s profit margins, a family MPV must be reliable and cost-effective to run so as to avoid crippling the family budget. Fiat’s 1.3-litre Multijet is well suited to both tasks. Its on-paper performance is fairly woeful with a full 16-seconds required to reach 60mph and a fair bit longer than that needed to approach the 97mph top speed but in real world driving conditions, things aren’t quite as bad as those figures suggest. There’s 133lb/ft of torque at just 1,750rpm which means you can accelerate with some urgency up to 30mph or so and what urge there is won’t be diminished too drastically by the presence of a heavy load on board. Fuel economy is excellent as well, with Fiat quoting a 51mpg average.

The 1.3-litre Multijet engine is one of three Euro IV-compliant diesel units offered with the Doblo and while the pricier 105 and 120bhp 1.9-litre JTD units offer much improved performance, the smaller Multijet is a more advanced powerplant. All the engines use the common-rail configuration that’s fast becoming a byword for economy and refinement in diesel cars but where the 1.9 JTD is what Fiat refer to as a Unijet engine, the 1.3-litre unit uses second generation Multijet technology.

In traditional diesel engines, fuel is fed to the injectors by a mechanical pump, the injection pressure rising with the rpm of the engine. This has repercussions on how efficiently the fuel is burnt, leading to noise, poor emissions and so-so fuel economy. A common-rail engine, however, maintains a constant injection pressure regardless of the weight of the driver’s right boot, the Unijet injectors also using so-called pilot injection to pre-warm the combustion chamber. This decreases noise, and vibration. Fire up the Doblo 1.9-litre JTD and you’ll appreciate the technology. The 1.3-litre Multijet engine is a progression from the JTD, it divides that main injection i