Recently Volkswagen’s CEO posted a photo of him with a new car, which excited plenty of fans, though he later claimed that the car is too cool to sell.
VW CEO Ralf Brandstätter frequently posts his personal opinions on LinkedIn, such as the Project Trinity and battery strategies previously. This time, however, he demonstrated a series of photos featuring the ID.X concept car and, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, stated that the car is too cool for sale.
Do you believe him?
First of all, let’s take a look at VW’s prior Project Trinity concept, which is a design that encompasses both passenger cars and commercial vehicles. See the picture below for a design drawing for a Project Trinity concept car which VW previously presented.
▲ Project Trinity concept pictures (Source: Herbert Diess)
Generally speaking, concept cars are a vehicle for automakers to elaborate on their visions of the future, with an exaggerated emphasis on a single aspect of said vision. In the above picture, for instance, we can clearly see VW’s intention of having XR functionality and driverless cockpits. Generally speaking, concept cars are a far cry from production models.
However, the concept car shown by VW this time is somewhat different. Let’s take a look at some photos first.
▲ VW’s ID.X concept car
This is relatively different from how most concept cars are released. First, there’s an actual physical car. Second, the car has a complete set of detailed interiors. Finally, VW has even released some data on the car.
According to Brandstätter’s claims, the ID.X concept car features many components originally used in ID.4 GTX. The former has a battery capacity of 82 kWh and a 329 maximum horsepower, not to mention the fact that both models have 4WD drivetrains. However, compared with other models in the ID family with similar batteries, the ID.X is about 200kg lighter, making it a powerful hatchback.
This concept car can accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in 5.3 seconds, which may be slightly worse than other competent EVs, although this still makes it faster than the similar-looking 2021 Golf GTI, which does 0-100 km/h in 5.7 seconds.
If you look at the photos closely, you’ll see that VW specifically notes “not for sale”, although whether this model enters mass production remains to be seen at the moment. Regardless, the “concept” that VW hopes to prove with this concept car may not be the vehicle itself, but rather the MEB chassis.
VW’s EV chassis MEB is featured in not only VW-branded cars, but also cars from other VW subsidiary brands. The MEB is even licensed for use by other automakers. One of MEB’s advantages is that the same chassis can be used as auto bodies of different vehicle size classes, utilities, and styles. At the moment, MEB is used across various designs, such as sedans (ID.3), SUVs (ID.4), and minibuses (ID.Buzz). If this chassis were to be used in hatchbacks (ID.X) too, then the range of possible applications would, needless to say, be even more diversified.
Will electric sports hatchbacks attract attentions from car buyers? We’ll find out soon enough.
(Image: Ralf Brandstätter)