Comeback kid on a bit of a buzz
Comeback kid Volkswagen is going backwards and forwards at the same time with its all-electric ID Buzz people mover concept car which it revealed at the Detroit Auto Show.
It’s the latest in at least five attempts the brand has had to rekindle the Kombi spirit since the millennium, but it’s never quite done it like this before.
While the outer skin clearly looks to the past, the internals of the ID Buzz are just as clearly a peak into Volkswagen’s future.
The concept car is a precursor to a model tentatively slated to join the VW lineup in 2020, with two electric motors, a longrange lithium-ion battery and seating for eight adults.
The all-wheel drive MPV has 275kW of total system power, with 150kW coming from an electric motor on the snubnosed front and the same from the one integrated into the rear axle structure. (And, before you ask, the nature of the power delivery means that, no, it doesn’t add up to 300kW.)
Volkswagen is also proposing a 200kW version as a pure rear-wheel drive model, which will be philosophically true to the original Kombi, with its electric motor sitting in the rear.
Designed with versatility in mind, it will be a key player in the company’s push to fully connected electric cars.
Desperate to distance itself from the Dieselgate emissions scandal, the ID Buzz will be one of brand boss Herbert Diess’s key players. VW is aiming to reposition itself as an environmentally responsible industry leader, with the concept following up the four-seat, rearengined ID hatch it showed at the 2016 Paris motor show.
With two fully scalable battery-electric architectures at its disposal, VW is planning to launch even more electric concepts before 2019, including a full SUV, a crossover, a coupe and a convertible sports car.
“The Volkswagen brand’s big electric offensive begins in the year 2020 with a completely new vehicle architecture,” Diess insists. “That is when we will be launching a new generation of fully connected, all-electric vehicles on the market. By 2025 we want to be selling 1-million of these vehicles annually.”
The Detroit concept will theoretically get to 100km/h in five seconds. The top speed is limited to 160km/h to protect the battery range and the integrity of the battery chemistry. There’s a long-range 111kWh lithium-ion battery as low as possible between the front and rear axles, with the upper part of its casing serving as the cabin’s floor.
Volkswagen claims a 600km range from the battery pack, which is about 70km more than the 95kWh Budd-e concept it launched during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2016. It takes 30 minutes to give the vehicle’s battery an 80% charge, which would be enough to eke out an extra 480km of range.
The ID Buzz also delivers VW’s latest upgrades for selfdriving technology, combining inputs and data from laser and lidar scanners, ultrasonic and radar sensors, a front camera and an area-view camera and processing it all through a central computer in real time.
It also combines the car’s own sensors with traffic data from a data cloud and the Here digital mapping operation owned by Audi, BMW and Daimler and, from the end of March, Intel.
The company has developed an all-new, revolutionary steering system for the model that doesn’t just pull the steering wheel into the dash, but completely decouples the steering wheel from the steering gear.
The design of the body and cabin of the ID Buzz take advantage of its reduction in space needed by the electric motors.
It may have little in common with the original Kombi under the skin, but it is certainly the closest the firm has yet come to producing a true successor to the original icon.