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VW sets a date for the reveal of its production-ready electric Microbus

 2 years ago
source link: https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22870273/vw-microbus-electric-id-buzz-date-reveal
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VW sets a date for the reveal of its production-ready electric Microbus Skip to main content

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Volkswagen

Nearly five years after it first revealed its ID Buzz concept at the Detroit auto show, Volkswagen is finally ready to show off a production-ready version of the beloved vehicle. VW CEO Herbert Diess tweeted that the “legend returns” on March 9th, along with a gif of the automaker’s iconic Microbus.

A staple of coastal California’s towns, the VW Microbus’ reincarnated as an electric vehicle was never a foregone conclusion. It wasn’t until an outpouring of positive feedback that VW decided to greenlight the concept for production. And even then, it won’t be road-ready until 2023.

The vehicle is a clear homage to the iconic vehicle that the company sold in North America between 1950 and 1980. The production version of the concept is expected to deviate little from the blunt-faced original because all of the batteries will be mounted under the floor. Think of a longer, more van-like Chevrolet Bolt, and you can get an idea of what the electric VW might be like to drive.

We’ve already been treated to images of the ID Buzz draped in high-tech sensors and hardware in its role as an autonomous test vehicle in Germany. VW has said the autonomous Microbus will serve as a platform for its full-scale commercial ride-hailing and delivery operation that it plans on launching in Germany in 2025.

We still don’t know many details about the upcoming EV, including whether VW plans on sticking with the slightly cheesy ID Buzz name. (It works fine for a concept with play and pause icons for pedals, but I’m not sure it will fly at a dealership.) We do know that the Microbus will stop atop VW’s mass-manufactured modular electric vehicle platform, or “MEB.”

It will join other MEB vehicles, including the ID 3 hatchback, ID 4 crossover SUV, and the upcoming ID 5 sporty SUV. VW may have lost confidence from consumers after the diesel emission scandal; the electric reincarnation of the iconic Microbus may be the best thing to smooth over some of that skepticism.

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There are 70 comments.

I hope they also update the atrocius capacitive buttons of the id3 and 4… whoever designed that driver cockpit never drove in a car before…

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 10:54 AM

They are so focused on making this all futuristic for some reason even tho people like the microbus for it’s retro styling.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 12:41 PM

This could very well be our family’s next vehicle as soon as you can buy them off lease and it ticks certain boxes.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 11:27 AM

The year is 2035 and TheVerge still will be mentioning diesel issues in every VW article.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 11:40 AM

They were really grasping to bring up diesel gate in this article.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 11:43 AM

Are you guys getting paid by Big Diesel or something?

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 11:49 AM

I mean it’s the whole reason they’re all in on EVs, it’s worth mentioning imo.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 12:30 PM

Right, and while we’re at it in every article about a new Apple product, remind people the only reason they’re in business is because Microsoft bailed them out in 1997.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 8:37 PM

Yes, a small footnote in the history of Apple is comparable to global fraud committed over decades by one of the biggest auto-manufactures in the world – which resulted in legal action from twenty-one countries. Half a million cars eligible for buy back, and the company forced to pay back almost 5 billion dollars just in the US; There’s zero difference between this pre-iPod Apple getting an investor almost 30 years ago.

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 1:14 PM

https://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deaths-europe-0303

1200 premature deaths in Europe alone, so I don’t think they should be let off the hook anytime soon.

Plus, according to internal memos, the ID designation stands for "ignore dieselgate".

I may have made that last one up.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 4:16 PM

HAHAH that would be hilarous!

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 4:22 PM

Considering the thousands of kids that now have permanently reduced lung functionality in places like UK and Germany as a result of their criminal acts…. I think we should talk about it for decades, yes.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 12:03 PM

Diesel was pushed on the EU/UK public by inept politicians and bureaucrats through tax policy to disadvantage petrol. Their assumptions were wrong: diesel is inherently more harmful to human health and the environment. In 1990, about 10% of new car purchasers in EU/UK were diesel; this rose to 60% by 2015. How many have permanently reduced lung function due to this?

Volkswagen (and others) are guilty of fraud. But they aren’t half as guilty as the politicians and planners.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 1:06 PM

Oh no, VW (and the other EU automakers like BMW and Mercedes and of course Bosch) is guilty as hell. They are the ones who mislead the politicians in the first place. They are the ones who created and maintained the deception.

The politicians bought into it like everyone else did.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 1:28 PM

What kind of politician blindly accepts the word of a self-interested corporation acting in a way that is nakedly and transparently self-interested?

I understand politicians never wanting to be held to account for anything. But getting the public to carry water (or diesel as it were) for their every failure – that’s a great trick.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 2:53 PM

It wasn’t just VW pushing Diesel to sway politicians, so it is not like they only listened to one source — politicians are not scientists or engineers — they need to rely on specialists, and in this case, the specialists were in the pocket of manufactures — not the first and not the last time either.

No one is saying blame should completely be one-sided, but just because they got it heavy when it happened doesn’t mean they are all forgiven now some time has passed. If I cheated with someone who didn’t know I wasn’t single, sure they should have done their due diligence but the guilt is not equal. Further to that analogy, if I want my partner to believe I have changed after cheating… actions and time — not words — are what reinstall faith and trust. Sometimes a cheater needs to eat shit for a while, till they prove they can be trusted again, if that is what they want. VW ruined the relationship they had with many customers, and saying "Sorry" doesn’t immediately fix it. If they want that relationship repaired then they need to keep eating some shit — less and less every year till they have earned trust back.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 3:55 PM

Diesel went from 10% to 60% of the market in a decade and a half directly because of bad policy. They shouldn’t have incentivized diesel over petrol. The cost to human health and the environment dramatically increased because of bad policy. The attempts by Volkswagen and others to evade emissions standards that their diesel engines couldn’t meet were incentivized by bad policy.

Imagine how many lives would have been saved if they had only set an emissions standard but not promoted diesel? The former is their job; the latter isn’t.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 4:18 PM

Agreed, I wasn’t placing all the blame on VW — I don’t think anyone is — however, there isn’t a scenario that anyone is more to blame than them, just not all of the blame. There is absolutely blame for the politicians and they are not absolved, but it isn’t like the politicians coerced VW to evade emission standards. Incentives are a common tool by any politician to promote any policy, as with EVs, residential solar panels, and all sorts of policies they feel may be beneficial to the greater public good, but because it requires people to break from their norm, need an immediate incentive to consider it beyond the potential longer-term benefits behind the reason for the policy change, to begin with.

I would disagree — they have to promote their policies, not just make them. As a graphic designer for over 20 years now, I have been contracted to work on a range of campaigns (not this) for various levels of government, and promoting various policies (when done in good faith) is vital to the program’s success because most of the general citizenry would have no clue and actually complain that information is being kept from them. Kinda screwed either way.

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 2:57 PM

What kind of politician blindly accepts the word of a self-interested corporation acting in a way that is nakedly and transparently self-interested?

One who is getting plenty of money from said self-interested corporation to look the other way and has no scruples?

In other words, most politicians?

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 3:55 PM

I don’t know what you think happened in Dieselgate, but it’s not like any politicians just took the company’s word for anything. These cars had been vetted by regulatory bodies all over the world – and passed inspection.

Bosch, along with the German car makers, engineered a system designed to fool the regulators worldwide. And it worked for over a decade. You don’t seem to understand what happened here, but it was a testing engineer working for the California Air Resources Board (CARB) that noticed an anomaly, started digging, and figured out that there was a deception happening. Bosch, VW, et al, fooled every regulatory body for over a decade.

So, of course the politicians relied on their own regulators to tell them the truth, but they were fooled too.

What do you think, some politician is going to figure this out where everyone else missed it? What world do you live in? Yes, it was bad policy, but not bad intentions, on the part of the politicians. They were not paid off. They were deceived along with everyone else on the planet.

I’m not a big fan of politicians in general, but to be fair here, that’s not where the problem was.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 5:13 PM

Funny you mention BMW who were proven to not cheat on diesel.
Maybe a good way of handling this as a consumer would be to give credit to those who apparently worked hard (and had less profits) to stick to regulations?

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 12:28 AM

You’re right, I remembered it wrong. It was Mercedes.

I stand corrected.

Also Audi and Porsche.

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 1:07 AM

yeah, let’s move on already and stop bringing up the wrongdoings of giant corps. Can’t you all see how much you are hurting VW group’s brand perception?

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 12:38 PM

Gotta get that Google SOE money.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 12:58 PM

I’ll stop bringing it up when they launch a credible EV charging network that they promised as punishment and not the dumpster fire that is Electrify America.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 3:33 PM

Rightfully so, especially since part of the fall out they had to promise to make electric cars.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 4:20 PM

Could also be September 3rd, considering he is german and probably doesn’t tweet in backwards US date format. :smile:

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 11:45 AM

"Production-ready" must be a technical term rather than the obvious definition a layman would come up with merely putting those two words together.

VW announced that in a few months they will reveal a vehicle that won’t be road ready for about a year.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 11:52 AM

I don’t like companies pre-announcing announcements months in advance, but I have no clue what you think production ready means. They literally mean this is the design that is ready for mass production. Maybe you’re confusing "production ready" with "produced already"?

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 1:09 PM

Production ready seems to me to mean production time plus delivery time (plus some time to sell the car?) equals on the road time. This seems like many extra months.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 2:43 PM

That would be "in production" or "under production."

"Ready" simply means that you are prepared for something that hasn’t happened yet. It provides zero insight on the timeline for when that something will happen (or even if it will happen). In this case, that something is production.

I imagine they’ll tell us when they are starting production at their event. Ramping production isn’t as simple has hitting a switch once the design is ready.

The 2023 "road ready" date isn’t from any recent VW source. At this point it’s just a placeholder for whatever they’ll say at the event. Honestly I’m as frustrated by how long this has taken as anyone is. Sorry for being overly pedantic (but it was kind of invited).

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 3:39 PM

Seems like you are being technical

Right? They aren’t ready for production if they aren’t ready for production. Ready in all ways.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 4:17 PM

If you call using words as they are defined in English being technical, then yes I am.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 8:16 PM

To get slightly technical in the context of your original post, and to provide insight on what’s likely happening: VW has one electric car factory in the US (starting ID.4 production mid 2022), two in China and two in Germany. I expect the van is ready and waiting for production capacity to open up at those factories. They call it production ready in part because they need to differentiate it from the concept versions they’ve shown thus far (and in part because it is "ready").

It is common industry practice to reveal the "production", "pre-production", "near-production", or "production-ready" version ahead of production. What they reveal on March 9 is what we can expect to get if we order one (although small refinements are likely as they start to roll off the production line). Part of why they do this is to gauge consumer interest in the final product and price points so that they can appropriately allocate production capacity to each model/trim. In the case of VW though, they basically need to produce more of everything electric. Glad the van is finally next in line.

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 3:02 PM

Actually I just listed the plants for the ID.4. I’m not sure if there are other factories producing the ID.3, which is their other electric vehicle. All these share the same MEB platform so they could be configured to produce any of the planned electric vehicles.

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 3:06 PM

VW announced that in a few months they will reveal a vehicle that won’t be road ready for about a year.

What are you talking about. The car’s been road ready and testing on the road for over a year.

You’ll be able to purchase and drive one before summer.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 5:41 PM

You’ll be able to purchase and drive one before summer.

Summer 2023?

And even then, it won’t be road-ready until 2023.

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 5:24 PM

I wonder how they’ll shortchange US buyers this time? The de-speced de-contented US VW ID4 is a huge disappointment and represents a almost cyclical view that VW has about Americans. Follows their line of thinking since they released a region specific Jetta and Passat in 2011.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 11:59 AM

This, plus they really should bring the ID3 here.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 7:58 PM

I am so excited for this. Hoping they do the Buzz right, and if they do, This Is My Next.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 12:21 PM

I want this van so bad!!! :smile:

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 12:25 PM

I just really hope it looks better than the concept, probably the ugliest concept ever created of one of the most iconic vehicles of all time.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 12:30 PM

These new VW EVs aren’t as great as they could be. I’ve just bought an EV in the UK and spent ages watching reviews and looking at cars. The ID3 particularly seems to have issues. The controls are poor, the software a bit buggy apparently and the build quality, unbelievably for VW smacks of cost cutting.
This may seem bizarre (and I’ll probably regret it!) but I ended up with one of the new FIAT 500 Electrics, partly because all of the above issues seemed much better thought through, even the build.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 12:35 PM

VW has been cost cutting for a long while. It’s really not that unbelievable.

My older GTI (>10 years old) has some sloppy ass badly wearing items, and I by no means think it started there.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 1:52 PM

They have shown how it is going to look. Which is to say, not really like the concept, but rather boring, like a regular VW minivan. This is unfortunate, as it would have been a good form factor for an EV.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 1:18 PM

I mean, for me at least, if I’m going to get something utilitarian (but still cool), it’s going to be something like this. If I’m getting to get something sporty… it pretty much doesn’t exist in electric form yet (some of the Honda and Hyundai concepts pass). But hell is a world where I get some stupid one-of-a-million crossover or SUV.

So I welcome this and hope they are successful with it.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 1:57 PM

Damn. The new ID4 is arriving in a week or two and I don’t have a year to hold out for this, but I would much rather have this…

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 2:27 PM

Canoo will have this space covered before VW, these are scheduled to be rolling off the line in the next 9 months. It’s also about 14 inches shorter than the ID.Buzz.

And it looks good in your usual fun VW bus kind of colors, either through factory paint or wrapping the solid panels. (These are renders, obviously — courtesy of GearboxPizzza on YouTube — but this looks to be 99% of the final production design as they are in gamma testing now and the form looks the same.)

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 3:09 PM

I’ll believe it when I see it. Canoo doesn’t seem too healthy, and it’s a car maker startup of all things.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 5:03 PM

It’s true, we don’t know and there are challenges in scaling up production, but we’ll know soon whether they can pull it off or not. And once upon a time every car maker on earth was a startup.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 5:24 PM

Canoo looks awesome, and I love the truck too. It’s gonna be a lot longer than 9 months though if I had to bet on it.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 5:39 PM

Love the aesthetics of the current crop of EV concepts. Let’s just hope that the car manufacturers focus just as much on producing well-made vehicles as they spent on getting the "look" right. I’m interested to see how both the Canoo and VW vehicles do over the next couple of years.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 6:42 PM

3/9 is probably September 3, not March 9 in this context. Since zee German said it.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 5:31 PM

Valid thought but do you really think he’d tease a reveal 9 months away?

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 7:30 PM

To be fair, I’d wager the actual van is still 9 years away. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 7:36 PM

I would drive that no problem

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 6:46 PM

I never knew I wanted to drive a minivan before now.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 7:31 PM

Hell yeah! I used to have 2 air-cooled VW Bugs that were older than I, and I’d totally drive that. Make it white on top and light blue or aqua on the bottom, and I’m there.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 8:02 PM

Two things:

VW has been promising a retro microbus revival for over 20 years now.

It better have outstanding range, because the appeal of van culture right now is predicated on driving them on long road trips.

Posted  on Jan 6, 2022 | 8:47 PM

^ This. The semi-mythical VW bus revival has been proposed and/or planned for over 20 years, and has gone thru several permutations during that time. Suffice it to say that I’ll believe it when I see it out on the road.

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 8:45 AM

Safari bus mode: overland to the next campsite, charge up while you sleep.

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 12:24 PM

The recent spy shots are a bit disappointing. While they don’t have back windows installed and it’s all plain white (probably the commercial variant), the lines don’t seem as clean, round and fluid as on the concept. To me, it just looks like a plain old van. We’ll see what some all-around windows and fun paint do to it. It’s possible that some of the panels are deliberately different from the final consumer release.

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 8:29 AM

Modular Electric . . . . Behicle?

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 12:53 PM

I suspected that it was a German acronym with the B standing for a German word I didn’t know.
Sure enough, Wikipedia says it’s "Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten," literally "modular electric-drive construction kit."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group_MEB_platform

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 5:45 PM

If it looks remotely like this and has a range near the 300 mile mark I would buy right away. But it would be great if it had lots of rotary knobs and switches as opposed to a very minimalistic cabin with a big touchscreen.

Posted  on Jan 7, 2022 | 1:17 PM

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