Volkswagen EV family expands to welcome ID.1 City Car

KUALA LUMPUR: Somewhere, during the last year, Volkswagen has announced to launch 75 new electric vehicles and 60 hybrid vehicles, by 2029. The blooming German’s automakers wing will soon produce a new fully electric city car, that is named as VW ID.1. ID.1 will specifically be for the urban playground and will hit the showrooms by 2023.

As per the German automaker, VW ID.1 is built on the footprints of slow-selling e-Up, the hatchback which was withdrawn from Australia after its sales started sinking. This micro-car will have five doors for a boxier look. There is more spacing on the inside of the car, all thanks to the electric powertrain features. Minimalist and shorter overhangs also don the car and make it super easy-breezy for urban driving.

Volkswagen’s ID.1 is the first of its electric marque that is set to feature some of the styling cues borrowed from the ID.3 hatchback.
It is interesting to note that two variants of ID.1- rugged ID.1 crossover version and e-Roomzz van version are also placed under the design book.

ID.1 is a pure battery-electric car and Volkswagen engineers have taken inspiration from the MEB architecture that was first featured in ID.3 hatchback. The fact of the matter is that cars built on MEB platform can prove to be 40% cheaper as compared to EV’s based on conventional chassis.

The head of the Volkswagen brand said to the press ‘In future, it will make no sense putting battery cells in a car designed for an engine as we have done with e-Up and this development was a stepping stone for our electric vehicle project. We are now constantly working on a Battery Electric Vehicle which can further shrink the Modular Electric Drive architecture, to bring the cost down further”.
Volkswagen has a solid shaped plan to launch a series of electric vehicles and design blue-prints are already in progress.

Categorically, ID.1 will be the smallest ID in an electric line-up which is built around seven main models. Next in line is the ID.2, which might give strong competition to VW’s rival Renault Zoe and Peugeot e-208. Besides that, a high-performance version of the ID.3 hatchback is also in pipeline. The next is ID.4 that will be influenced on the platform of ID Crozz concept which expected towards the end of 2020

Volkswagen’s plans for the future electric line-up looks very promising and seems the German automaker is all set to dominate the clean engine auto category.