01
Origins
The Syrena 110 of the mid-1960s was FSO's engineers showing what the little national car could become: a cleanly styled two-box prototype with a modern silhouette that anticipated the European hatchback wave, developed to replace the ageing original. It progressed to running prototypes and genuine promise — then politics intervened. Poland's leadership chose to license the Fiat 125 instead, concentrating the industry's resources on building an Italian design under the Polski-Fiat badge, and the 110 was cancelled; the old Syrena soldiered on for another decade and a half in its original form. The surviving prototype, preserved in Poland, has become a small national talisman of paths not taken — evidence that the imagination existed, even where the permission did not.
Syrena110 cockpit · Hubert Śmietanka vel Hiuppo · CC BY-SA 2.5
