Still reeling from the effects of the diesel emissions scandal, and not long after a Volkswagen spokesperson said that VW does "not expect diesel to return to the US with the same significance", Volkswagen is committing to pushing forward and going all-out on electric cars instead. The automaker is planning to use the Paris Motor Show in October to preview their move toward a heavy-on-the-volts future.
Volkswagen is expected to reveal a concept that they have referred to as an "iconic design study", and VW has said the car will be "as revolutionary as the Beetle was seven decades ago". Those are big claims, so what is VW's plan to back them up? The first is the new MEB platform that the new golf-sized car will be based on. That platform is said to be scalable to reach up to a 600 km range. It's the platform that VW plans to base their next generation EVs on, as part of their plan to sell two to three million electric cars per year by 2025. Next is the shape, but all we've gotten so far is the teaser below.
The new platform is slated for production in late 2019, so the design revealed in Paris won't go into production before then, but it is likely to be one of the first cars on the platform after the Budd-E concept revealed earlier this year. VW's head of EVs, Christian Senger, says VW needs to sell EVs that can be a primary car, not one with a short range that is relegated to being a second car. He says that the least people will accept for that is a 400 km range. That means that the concept revealed next month will likely have a range of at least that (on the more lenient European test), but less than the 600 km projected maximum.
