1968 "AS" series 124 Spider

This particular '68 Spider may or may not have any number of features that owners of late Spiders might find odd, or even confusing.

 

1968 saw a number of changes throughout the entire production year, and these early cars did not get the helpful door tags that our later cars have, showing the month and year of manufacture. The month of manufacture can tell us if it was early or late in the year, which can help explain a lot of oddities.

 

This car originally had no electric radiator fan, it had a clutch-style fan on the water pump. The windshield washer has no electric pump either, there is a foot operated pump on the left side of the driver's floor, where an old American car would have had a high beam switch. The headlight switch is only two positions, with the steering stalk having an 'extra' position. (Not sure if it had the relay setup to turn headlights off when the car was turned off.) The front seat back reclining knobs were mounted inboard, and had chrome inserts. There were also chrome accents on the defroster fan switch, and the interior rearview mirror.

 

Of course, the gauges were different too, flat-faced, with chrome bezels. Very early cars had chrome on the steering wheel, too. The seats are different, much more 'bucket' shaped, and they had a 'cleaner' look with no head rests. The seatbelts were retractorless chrome 'aircraft' lever-style, with spiffy Fiat logos on them. The engine bay has lights that work on the same marker light circuit that operates the trunk light. The marker lights are round, "bee hive" style lights, and the front grill has only a few horizontal stainless bars. The front Fiat badge was on the smooth (no bump) hood, though a few inches higher than the '74 & later cars. This car also had manual choke & throttle controls.

 

The tail lights are different, too - much smaller, with no integrated reverse lights. To comply with US standards, they added a single reverse light under the driver's side rear bumper - it was actually a Ferrari turn signal, just with a clear lens! Even the rocker panels are a bit different, the stainless trim was not attached to the door sill, it was purely a decorative strip that wasn't integrated like our later cars.

 

The little 1438 motor had a block mounted distributor, and all of our later cars still have that mounting spot, though it's plugged. It's odd to see the exhaust cam box with it's clean (no distributor mount) look. The battery was up front, which gave a great deal more space in the trunk than our later cars had. However, all our later cars still had vestiges of that original battery box in the inner fender!

 

Some of these "AS" series features persisted into the beginning of the "BS" series in 1970, but few were still there by late '73 when production began on the "CS" series.

 

I saw this car on Fiatspider.com, and after posting it on our Chicagoland FLU site, my friend Iowa Mike bought it.  It has some rust, but it’s not structural.