What's the news?
It's been much-teased, but here is the new Volkswagen Microbus, or the Budd-e as Volkswagen somewhat excruciatingly insists on calling it. It's an electric car concept, but one which should make it into production in relatively unchanged form, with sales promised by 2019.
Underneath, the Budd-e (which plays on both the old 'Bulli' nickname for the original Type-2 Transporter and, obviously, the word buddy) uses Volkswagen's new MEB, or Modularen Elektrisch Baukasten - essentially an electric answer to the MQB flexible platform system. The MEB has already been seen under the Porsche Mission-E concept and the Audi e-Tron Quattro (which will become the Q6 e-Tron in 2018) and the Budd-e has similar performance figures to those two cars.
There's a massive lithium-ion battery stack underneath, 101kWh worth, which powers two electric motors making the Budd-e four-wheel-drive. Those two motors combine to produce 305hp and 490Nm of torque, and Volkswagen claims a 0-100km/h sprint in a little over seven seconds, with a top speed just south of 160km/h.
More critically though, the range has been stretched. While the Porsche and Audi concepts claimed 500km one charge range, Volkswagen says that according to the NEDC electric car test, the Budd-e can go for as much as 600km between charge-ups. Better still, it uses the high-energy 150kW fast-charging system which Porsche developed for the Mission-E, which means an 80 per cent charge up from flat in just 15 minutes, giving you a potential 400km range.
With its 'Nevada White' bodywork and 'Phoenix Copper' roof, the Budd-e looks surprisingly un-retro - we had been expecting something that more obviously looked like a classic Type 2 'Splittie.' Volkswagen appears to be rather more keen on looking to the future though, and that's certainly apparent inside. The whole instrument panel wraps around the driver, and Volkswagen says that the two massive screens (one for instruments and one for infotainment) effectively blend into one another. There's high-tech gesture control, which means you'll hardly ever have to actually touch those screens (no unsightly finger prints) and a voice control system, which can recognise generic phrases, rather than specific commands. It's apparently so clever, that the four-zone climate control system can hear someone complain about the temperature in their corner of the car, and adjust it to suit.
Volkswagen says that the Budd-e is designed to be fully connected to the web when on the move (within the bounds of safety) and that it also previews much of the company's forthcoming autonomous driving tech. Volkswagen is likely to launch a self-parking system on the 2017 MkIII Touareg and the Budd-e will almost certainly have at least that level of robot control when it comes to the market in 2019.
There's even a slide-out drawer mounted in the rear bumper, which can allow delivery services, such as Amazon, to drop a package into the car (having been issued with an authorisation code) without ever accessing the interior.