Well, these are two pretty similar cars we have here! It's only details that could potentially make the difference. Considering they both belong to the city car segment and utilize the same 3-door hatchback body style and the front wheel drive system, it all comes up to the specific petrol engine choice they offer. The first one has a FIAT-engineered powertrain under the hood, a 4-cylinder, 16-valves 80hp unit, while the other one gets its power and torque from a 3-cylinder, 12-valves 58hp engine designed by Daihatsu.

Unfortunatelly, neither of the two vehicles was submitted to the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) testing. This makes it virtually impossible for me to pick one over the other and I'm generally against buying such cars as the safety should really always come first. Moving further on, let's take a closer look at some additional safety-related facts. Both vehicles belong to the city car segment, which is generally not a very good thing safety-wise, but it doesn't do much to help us decide between the two. Furthermore, when it comes to weight, a factor that most people underestimate, the Italian car offers a self-explainatory difference of 50% more metal.

I don't like generalizing things when it comes to reliability, although it does seem that Daihatsu does have a slight advantage, at least on all of the models level. That's the official data, while our visitors describe reliability of FIAT with an average rating of 4.3, and models under the Daihatsu badge with 4.2 out of 5. The same official information place Palio as average reliability-wise, and Cuore is more or less at the same level.Above it all, drivers of cars with the same engine as the Italian car rank it on average as 4.3, while the one under the competitor's bonnet gets 4.5 out of 5.

Daihatsu is a bit more agile, reaching 100km/h in 0.4 seconds less than its competitor. Still, it lacks the power to win the top speed competition, topping at 145 kilometers per hour, 22km/h less than the other car. When it comes to fuel economy an obvious choice would be the Italian car, averaging around 0 liters of fuel per 100 kilometers (0 mpg), in combined cycle. That's 100% difference compared to the Japanese car!

Daihatsu appears just a bit more reliable, although the difference is truly marginal. The most important thing when deciding between any two vehicles should always be safety, both passive and active. In my opinion, everything taken into account, the Italian car beats the other contender by far, making it the best choice without even considering other things. It all continues in the same direction, with FIAT offering somewhat better performance, just enough to call it quicker. To make things even better, it consumps less fuel! All together, there's not much more to say, in this case I wouldn't even consider anything but FIAT. In any case that's my personal view, built upon all the data available to me. What should decide here though is the way you feel about the two vehicles, and I hope you'll find my guidelines useful in the process. In case you have two minutes to spare I invite you to define your needs, desires and budget and see which car would be chosen by the virtual adviser™, among more than 12.000 different ones in our database.