VW’s ID Buzz meets its maker
Volkswagen’s EV future bus and its iconic inspiration take on the mean streets of San Francisco
IF IN 1967 you were cruising around San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in your VW camper van you could easily have bumped into Janis Joplin, or perhaps Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick, or maybe Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. Close to the Golden Gate Bridge, the area was home to these icons of the emerging hippy counterculture, who’d moved there because it was cheap. They were very soon followed by groupies, dealers, daytrippers and others lured by the idea of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. It quickly soured, and the icons either died or moved on. But the VW bus stayed. Legendary hippy-era rock ’n’ roll venues like Fillmore West and the Avalon Ballroom are no more, but 50 years on certain parts of the city still move to the music of the Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Doors. To this day, the area is still seen as the mecca for latterday hippies; at once promised land and tourist trap. At times San Francisco seems slightly embarrassed by all this, but at others it’s keen to encourage it. And so it is with VW and the Microbus, or Kombi, or Transporter, or Type 2 (when the Beetle was Type 1). Call it what you will, it was launched in 1950 with a rear-mounted air-cooled engine that kept the whole vehicle simple and relatively roomy. It evolved a bit, but the basic idea was so strong that variations on the theme were still being built decades later. Initially intended as a load carrier and/or passenger van, it was available in large quantities as a preloved bargain by the time the hippies emerged. Chiming with their communal ethos, it could combine elements of crash pad, beach hut and Greyhound bus. Meanwhile, 6000 miles to the east of Haight-Ashbury, and about 2000 light years away from the Summer of Love, my first school bus was a 30bhp 1957 VW T1 painted in subdued post-war blue-grey and trimmed with a best-forgotten mix of rubber and leatherette. I usually sat up front, my right foot resting on the grey tin blister that protected the headlamp assembly from the inside. There was no radio, no heater worth mentioning and no seat adjustment, just sliding side windows to fiddle with, which I did incessantly. We made our own entertainment in those days. So when we go for a drive around San Francisco in a prototype of 2022’s VW ID Buzz electric MPV along with a 1952 Mk1 Microbus, it’s both a reminder of the past and a taste of the near future. A prototype it may be, but this feels production ready, and it provides a vivid demonstration of how electric propulsion, autonomous driving and digitisation are going to redefine the mission of the motor car over the next 10 to 15 years. VW has shown many possible 21st century Microbuses, but this is the one that’s really going to make it into production, in a finished form that’s close to this concept. The combination of ID electric thinking and funky camper-van packaging has proved irresistible: get rid of the internal combustion engine and you free up some valuable space, and simultaneously you acquire the green credentials your target market demands. The initial buyers won’t be alternative-lifestylers any more than they were for the original in 1950, but they will certainly want their new acquisition to alert the world to the fact that they’re more in tune with shiny Silicon Valley than stinky Detroit. If the reception the prototype got on our tour of San Francisco is anything to go by, VW’s on to a winner. We head to the hippy heartland to canvass opinion, and bang on cue two time-warped hippies called Dean and Don stumble into our convoy. The T1 triggers all sorts of positive vibes for them, while many more forward-looking San Franciscans regard the ID Buzz as a serious alternative to the electric car or hybrid they currently run. When it arrives in 2022, VW intends to sell the ID Buzz at a price close to a base-level long-wheelbase Transporter T6 (which becomes the T7 in 2019), currently around £30,000. That’ll be way too much for Dean and Don, but a tempting proposition for Tesla or Priusdriving middle-class families. And once their attention has been grabbed by the Buzz, there will be a choice of IDs waiting for them. VW is envisaging a whole new family of electric vehicles, rather than a bunch of pre-existing models with their engines replaced by electric powertrains. We’re driving the ID Buzz just three days after VW publicly confirmed that the project will be going into production. It will, in fact, be the last of the first batch of VW ID models to come to market. Wolfsburg’s e-attack begins in early 2020 with the Golf-size ID (the cover car from our March issue) and the Tiguan-size ID Cross. In 2021, we expect to see the boxy Touareg-size ID SUV and the seven-seat ID Lounge, a crossover coupé with MPV cabin space. As well as the ID Buzz, the plan for 2022 includes a large version of4
A prototype it may be but this feels production ready, and provides a vivid demonstration of how electric propulsion is rede ining the car