Electric drive provides great freedom for designers,” Volkswagen’s head of design, Klaus Bischoff, told us recently. “We minimise the cooling holes; the axles move further apart and generate stunning proportions. We have the unique chance to lead Volkswagen into a new age.”
And so arrive preview pictures of the Volkswagen ID Buggy, a concept car that’ll be at the Geneva motor show next month, which is precisely where a concept car like this would stay were it internally combusted.
But because it’s electric, it might – might – have a future.
Car companies have sometimes been wary of the phrase ‘platform’ in the past, often preferring ‘architecture’ to define an engineering structure that pertains mostly to the parts between a car’s front and where the driver sits.
In a typical internally combusted car, it’s where the expensive bits are: the powertrain, the electronics, and complex bits of the crash structure.
Creating many different models from one common architecture, then, is cheaper than redoing the whole shebang for each one.
But it brings limitations: there’ll be different engine sizes, the beefiest of which will need more cooling, which might define the car’s bonnet height, which determines windscreen height, and therefore roughly where the driver sits and the roof height.
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VW have been basing vehicles
VW have been basing vehicles on single platforms for years, recently MQB comes to mind.
This does not mean that coachbuilders have a free reign, just that VW can maximise profit across all of their brands from platform development investment costs. If they have a single platform underpinning VW, Skoda, SEAT, Audi, rather than perhaps a couple of bespoke platforms per brand, they can spend less on development per model.
Coach building?
Can’t do it now, why?, because of all the safety that has to be built in, imagine three People buy the same underpinnings for want of a better description but the each have there own body design, in Days gone by you could just build a Car how you wanted it, it’s just that it might have been not safe......
Return of the coachbuilder
There could be some opportunity here. The skateboard platforms are flexible but the trend of mass individualisation in the west and the rise of the mega rich in China both create consumer demand. Bespoke exteriors and interiors. That is a whole lot more exclusive than a Rolls or a Ferrari.
They might be all style and little substance but what the heck