Andreas Mindt's plan to fix Volkswagen's ID crisis

“It was yellow, I still know the numberplate and can still recall the smell and the sound.” Mindt learned to drive in a diesel Golf (“if you let the clutch out too early you’d just kill the engine; it was the hardest car to learn in”), and bought himself a Beetle as his first car for 500 Deutschmarks.

“It was the cheapest car you could get,” he says. Mindt still owns a 1970 version today.

So when Mindt was given just six weeks to design a concept for a small electric VW but within considerable constraints (it had to sit on the running gear of the much-maligned ID Life concept), he had already been thinking about it for decades.

“I started my job in February,” he says, “and in the middle of March we had the presentation. I had to start running; it was jumping into the water no matter the temperature. 

There was high pressure: I had to move from England to Germany, so I had to let other people sort that. I’m still missing some things! My sole focus in those six weeks was to transform our new strategy into this product.

“With only six weeks it had to be a zero-mistake process. If you make one mistake it’s in the car. It’s crazy pressure: this was a starting point for Volkswagen. And now we’re going through the portfolio and connecting this to that.”

Mindt admits it’s “a bit strange” for a car maker to start a design reinvention with a small model, but he says the approach fits the ‘people’s car’ heritage that dates back to VW’s origins.

“The Beetle is a very optimistic, happy-looking, friendly car,” he adds.

“It’s not eating people, you know: other cars, they’re trying to eat everything, like eating the street or something. Volkswagen is not about that, it’s not all super-duper; it’s being the friendliest in the room.

“If you’re a volume maker you’re interested in not polarising, and most people want to look self-confident and happy. Not cute or comical, like a Mickey Mouse car, but optimistic and happy. This is what people want, not aggressive.”

The ID 2all was followed last year by a sporty ID GTI variant, which further cemented VW’s future design language and showed how the performance sub-brand will be reinvented for the modern era.

“We did the ID GTI to explain the Volkswagen brand more,” says Mindt. “It has to be two things: stable and likeable. 

And the third one is the secret sauce: the special, unexpected, inspiring stuff we had to add. The first two are homework and are seen in the ID 2. The third was not so easy to understand: what do we mean by secret sauce?

“To explain that we did the GTI concept. There’s a lot of secret sauce on it. There’s a good stance on it, for example, which makes it look safe and stable but also very sporty, like you want to drive it round corners like a go-kart. With the GTI we dialled everything up so you can really understand what we mean.”

The GTI concept is full of little design cues, although Mindt says it’s the “strong basic architecture” that forms the “big building bricks” of a car design. “It always comes first, and you feel it, but very few people talk about it,” he says. “When you have a slim body and wide axles, it looks really good.”

Those small details help convince purists Volkswagen is connecting with its past, but they must have a function, says Mindt, “otherwise it’s just a decorative element – and we don’t want to do decoration any more”. He points to the hubcaps that feature the textured ‘golf ball’ pattern that apes the gearstick knob of manual GTI cars.

Mindt and his design team won’t just be leaning on past cues: they are currently working on 49 model lines and 150 different models.

“That’s a bit crazy,” he admits. “It’s really a lot.” While many of those models will use shared platforms, VW has begun to diverge from its previous strategy of global models and design towards more region-specific cars, particularly in North America and tech-focused China.