Volkswagen seeks to counter rivals with budget EV model

I might be too old but I still don’t understand why carmakers have to do electric vehicles weirder than gas vehicles in every sense, weirder lines, weirder lights, weirder names, weirder interiors.

Not saying is bad, just saying.

Yeah they could just call it the Golf EV and be done with it

I guess it makes the car harder to compare.

If you have a Golf vs E-Golf, you will compare everything from range, weight,...

They want attention for sales from a younger demographic. That is because old people are too set in their ways to be willing to buy newer models and getting the young to adopt it will eventually produce a new generation of old people who will only buy it. That is how Toyota killed the Avalon. They chased after young people by making the car weirder and weirder, and then the people who actually wanted it could not stand to look at it anymore.

That is my personal opinion that is the result of a small sample set of observations.

There is already an e-Golf, seems like a pretty reasonable car, no idea on the price/range, etc. A friend had one, was nice.

They don't. A BYD Seal or BYD Dolphin or a Sealion 7 look like 'normal' cars inside and out.

In what way does the Avalon look weird? It looks like a typical car to me. If you want weird look at Citroen cars.

EVs have less inherent character than internal combustion cars. They're all quiet and refined, with stable handling thanks to a low centre of gravity. Most of them offer far more performance than any normal person needs. A small electric city car doesn't feel all that different to a large electric sedan, it's just smaller. That's an existential threat for legacy auto manufacturers, because it offers fewer points of differentiation against much cheaper Chinese brands.

EVs are less constrained in terms of packaging. The battery and all the working parts are stashed down in the floor, so you can do whatever you like from the wheels up, without having to worry about where you're going to fit the engine or transmission or gas tank.

Some manufacturers are making EVs that look just like their gasoline-powered equivalents, but there's a real possibility that they're headed down a blind alley. I think that manufacturers who fully embrace the design freedoms of EVs and find new ways of creating distinctive experiences will stand a much better chance of surviving the next decade. Weird doesn't mean good, but bland is just a concession of defeat.

Gas car design is in large part constrained by aerodynamics and safety. the engine takes up some space that a battery would not need but that hood is there anyway.

My problem is the exact opposite - they don't really explore the possibilites of a fully free form design, and the weirdness is always on the surface level.

For example, I'd love to get a car which doubles as a mobile work pod, where I could drive to a foresty car park, set up a hotspot, run the A/C, plug in my computer and do my days work from there.

But despite all the bells and whistles, interior layout is still very conservative.

Well, I was looking at cars passing by while waiting for a bus and new ICE cars don't look normal either today. The bodywork is too busy for my taste, they resemble toys rather than utilitarian vehicles.

So, VW had the eGolf and the eUp. They looked so similar to their petrol siblings that most people ended up thinking that the id.3/4 was VW's first electric car. Meanwhile, everyone knew about, say, the BMW i3 and the Nissan Leaf and the gratuitously weird Hyundai Iconiqs.

At least slightly weird-looking electric cars seems to be what the market _wants_.

It's dead; the id.3 was the replacement. Priced similarly to the id.3, but it didn't sell well compared to other comparable EVs AIUI. My theory is that at least a decent subset of people who want to buy an EV want an EV which looks like an EV, ie weird. Hence the id.3, which is _vastly_ more successful than the eGolf.

Oh, I didn't realize they killed it. I like the golf...

Electric vanagon? Or the ID.Buzz might work.

https://soymotor.com/sites/default/files/usuarios/redaccion/...

While the idea is good, I do have to call out the Buzz as a herald of a worrying trend in van design (that's not exclusive to EVs) - building vans on top of standard road car platforms instead.

This results in longer vehicles, with lesser proportion of useful space, the packaging being worse than some ICE vans (and much worse than the original VW Bus).

This is to save engineering and manufacturing costs, which is kinda a bad thing to do when your vehicle retails for this much.