Volkswagen has been teasing the crap out of us with its impending electric car. First, they showed us the boxy little BUDD-e concept. Then the company told us it would debut an EV in Paris based on that car, and that it’d get up to 373 miles of range. And last week, we got three teaser photos. Finally, today we get a look at the entire exterior, but in sketch form.
I’ll get to see Volkswagen’s electric car concept, which VW says will become a production model in 2020, next week at the Paris Motor Show. But until then, the closest thing I’m going to get to the full shebang are these recently-released, high-level sketches. And I like what I see.
I see a lot of the same stuff I saw in the renderings: sleek and narrow rear lights, the little spoiler on the rear hatch, and distinctive headlights with what looks like a strip of LEDs running along their contours.
These new sketches add to that, showing us aggressive lower body cladding, and a very wide and pronounced lower fascia. There’s also a pair of sliding rear doors, and no B-pillar— a thing of beauty if you ask me.
On the roof, there looks to be panoramic glass or, more likely, a solar panel. There are also four illuminated circles up there, though I have no clue what they might do.
The sketches show a car that doesn’t have much of a hood, but that’s no surprise, since VW’s Modular Electric Platform, which debuted on the BUDD-e concept, doesn’t need a big schnoz, as there’s really not that much to package up front.
These are clearly early-on, high-level sketches— done well before the engineering team even came into play and ruined all the fun.
Those giant wheels with no gap to the body, the thin little windows that make a Camaro look like a veritable greenhouse, the sharply raked windshield, the rear doors that seem to slide on air, the lack of mirrors, the lack of a cooling opening, the missing charging port— all of these things are fairly standard omissions in early sketches. We’ll see what the real deal looks like next week.
Still, with this as a starting point, I have high hopes, and God do I hope they keep this thing B-pillar-less.