GENEVA MOTOR SHOW: Volkswagen previews EV flagship

Volkswagen's plans for its dedicated electric-car fleet have gone from zero to a confirmed model range so big that it needs a flagship.

It's a clear signpost of where Volkswagen wants its design efforts to head in its new era of electrification, with more than 20 full battery-electric cars planned to be in production by 2025.

Volkswagen's autonomous I.D. Vizzion concept car is so huge that it dwarfs even the old Phaeton and is longer than any production Volkswagen on sale anywhere in the world today, edging beyond even the seven-seat VW Atlas/Teramont SUV (5037mm).

The 5.11-metre-long self-driving limousine concept car gives a very strong hint about what the I.D. electric sub-brand's big limousine will look like when it hits production in 2021.

While the body style and interior dimensions are looking forward by two or three years, the rest of the drive and operational technology is pushing out by at least a decade.

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Inside line

motoring.com.au took an exclusive tour of the I.D. Vizzion at Volkswagen's Wolfsburg design studio last week, with the company's design chief Klaus Bischoff showing us around every inch the car.

Despite its tremendous size, the all-electric concept car only has four fully reclining seats and the promise of an enormous luggage area, but it lacks both a steering wheel and pedals because it's a fully self-driving concept.

"This car you will see in 2021 as a production car on the road, but not at Level 5 (autonomous capability). It will have the steering wheel and pedals and maybe have Level 3 or 4, but not 5," he insisted.

Though Bischoff admits the 'real' Vizzion will be a little bit shorter and a little bit narrower, he insists the production version will look almost the same as the organically swooping concept.

"Maybe it will be a little smaller in production. This is a 5.11-metre car with a 3.1-metre wheelbase. Germans like five-metre cars, but not more.

"It [the production version] will be 4.9 metres or something. That's the logical step of what we have already announced for markets worldwide.

"America, China and Europe are the obvious ones, mostly America and China. Is Germany ready for this? I think so. Maybe in a few years' time we will have made our steps. I do hope so. We have to be."

Even so, Bischoff admits the design could have been taken further, inside and out, but that wasn't quite what they were aiming for.

"Volkswagen is about designing products that are liked by many, many people and this shows where we are going. It is not the function to just create an image for a designer. It's a statement of the company where we are heading.

"It's not where we are going. It's the signpost," he insisted.

"We could have gone further. It's our job to lead the people to the way, not to show them the complete thing at the start. We have to lead them there and not to do something for designers that nobody will want.

"It's not good to take a design to the moon and turn around and there's nobody there."

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Best seat in house

Bischoff also insists the adoption of Level 5 autonomy will shift the best-chauffeured seat in the house from the back to the front, upending centuries of luxury transport philosophy.

"Why is that? If you look at the many things that are changing when cars are getting autonomous, the first row becomes the best position on the car to be chauffeured," Bischoff explained.

"Why should I sit in the back? I can, and I might, but the best position is now the first row. It has a relaxed position and there is a better ride between the wheels in the middle, rather than closer to the rear wheels."

To make it even more credible as a chauffeur-self-driven limousine, it can also fully blacken all its windows so people can sleep or just travel in privacy.

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Electric autonomy

While fully control-free driving systems won't make it into the 2021 production car, it will retain much of the I.D. Vizzion concept's powertrain and its 111kWh lithium-ion battery pack.

With 225kW of power from two electric motors, the I.D. Vizzion can theoretically hit 180km/h while driving itself at all times. It has no steering wheel, pedals or transmission, so it's full Level 5 and only Level 5.

Volkswagen insists it has a range of 665km, though that factors in brake regeneration systems recuperating energy whenever the car slows down and the car's 0.23Cd aerodynamic drag coefficient.

"It's the elongated version of the MEB [platform]. It's a little bit wider, but in general you can believe it or not, it's more or less in the proportion that you will see in production," Bischoff said.

"It's a little narrower and shorter, but not much and in series production it will have a huge trunk with hinges at the top of the rear window.

"The biggest advantage of the modular electric toolkit (MEB) is the growth in inner space. The true customer advantage is that with literally the same or slightly smaller footprints, you gain a lot of inner space.

"It's always a jump in class. We have Phaeton exterior size of today and interior is the Phaeton long-wheelbase in size.

"If you look into the I.D., the product that will come first to the market place at the end of 2019, you will see that it is slightly smaller than Golf but the inner space is more like Passat."

Besides space creation, the extraordinary thing about the I.D. Vizzion is that it doesn't have a single screen or gauge or dial in its massive interior.

Around the bend

The company that is on the verge of introducing the curved Innovision touch-screen for the Touareg is already admitting it is trying to make the technology redundant.

Drivers will instead give the I.D. Vizzion instructions either by voice recognition or a revolutionary 3D hologram system, which is kind of a floating, mid-air multi-media system.

"We have an interface that is holographic, therefore you have to wear these glasses," Bischoff said.

"Then in space, floating in mid-air, you have a holographic display or displays with symbols that you are able to control with gestures.

"It's like a touch screen with no screen, and you don't see it at all when you take off the glasses."

It's even more advanced than even that sounds, because the glasses mean a reclining 'driver' doesn't even have to lift up to see a screen or a fixed-position hologram.

Instead, the hologram's position relates to the glasses, so people can just keep lying down and deliver their gestures from the seat.

There are separate hologram 'touch-screen' functions for all four seats in the car, too, though they 'switch off' when the glasses come off.

"The mission was to empty the car," Bischoff insisted.

"If you want to throw a stone as far out as possible and try to be truly visionary, then our prediction is that we don't have any screens anymore."

Digital key

At this stage, the I.D. Vizzion will be opened and closed by smartphone technology, though Bischoff suggests that could change in sooner rather than later.

"You might have your personal devices or an iPad with you … if we still have them like that in 10 years.

"Let's see. Maybe they we will only have wearables. Projections, holographs, something like that.

"With the smartphone you go to the car and it opens it. What's more, you can send the opening key to a family member or a friend.

"If you have it on your mobile device, you can send the key. You leave the car in the city and your daughter or son needs it to go somewhere, you just send the key and the position of the car to their devices. We call it a digital key.

"This will definitely come to the market with the I.D. We aren't planning our own branded wearable to carry this technology, but others might be. I think that this will come in the future."

Voice recognition, too, is expected to continue taking big leaps forward between now and when the I.D. Vizzion hits showrooms, though Bischoff suggests it's pretty good now.

"You can just talk to the car. That's the first way of handling things, before you use the hologram.

"How could Australians drive it [on voice recognition]? They could. The voice recognition is future transportation in 10 years or even more. 2030.

"There are a few hypothetical features in there. Of course voice recognition is not hypothetical and we have it today, but it will make more steps. By then, even the Scottish and the Australians will be able to control it."

LED-crazy

It also makes big steps with its lighting technology, going full LED with slivers of headlights that communicate with the outside world, particularly for pedestrians, but only in white. Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Porsche and BMW are aiming for full-colour projections.

"The headlights are much smaller. We are fighting for that. There is no reason headlights need to be so big. They are only ever big for cost reasons," Bischoff insisted.

"It has LED technology and we have inside it a projection system that has 8000 pixels and it can project content onto the road."

It has one significant problem with the I.D. Vizzion's light signature, though. It plans to light up the Volkswagen badges in the centre of the grille and at the rear, but not in Germany.

Lighting up logos is illegal advertising in Germany, and some of its European neighbours have similar laws.

"For us it is a natural step to recruit the badge into the lighting figure of the car. To do so is very complicated," Bischoff said.

"We are not allowed to do it by law in Germany. The German government is stating that this would be advertising. But if it's unlit it is not advertising. China and the US are different.

"We have to black off the badge in production for Germany but everybody has a light signature now with LED daytime running lights, so it's how to tell them apart."

Not a kombi

The all-wheel drive I.D. Vizzion runs effectively the same batteries, engines and suspension systems as the I.D. Buzz electric Kombi concept the Volkswagen showed at the Los Angeles motor show.

The only significant difference is that the I.D. Vizzion's wheelbase is slightly smaller than the new, modern Kombi.

"It's very similar to I.D. Buzz. If you modularise it and don't change the components you can buy them in large numbers and when you do so the price goes down," Bischoff explained.

"The module (Volkswagen Group's Modular Electric Toolkit, or MEB) should be able to create different body styles and body types and designs.

"Therefore you need this toolkit and change to the design language and the proposition that you want to build up.

"If you create an I.D. Buzz it has totally different proportion but the same components. This car is totally different to the bus but the same components."

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Weighty issues

Volkswagen hasn't given the concept or the production car a weight figure, though Bischoff admits battery-electric cars will be considerably heavier than a similarly-size internal-combustion car.

Coping with that weight is one of the three reasons why it runs on 23-inch wheels and tyres (the others are their extra torque and, obviously, design).

Despite the larger wheels, it runs smaller brake discs than current internal-combustion cars, with the early stages of all braking effort being made by the electric motors, regenerating energy into the battery.

The VW MEB architecture is completely different to the battery-electric architecture that Porsche and Audi will use for their e-tron and Mission E electric cars.

Porsche has gone for the lowest possible batteries to keep its driving position lower and its cars' handling sharp, despite the weight of the batteries. Volkswagen hasn't.

"The Porsche batteries are lower and the driver has to sit lower because it's a sports car. Ours is an all-wheel drive system and e-engines parallel to each axle. The basic I.D. just gets a rear-drive motor.

"But at Volkswagen, we are about the democratisation of technology and the accessibility of it. We are absolutely not considering this to be a niche product."

He confirmed that Volkswagen would use the same type of battery cell and module across its entire I.D. range, with the MEB architecture following the MQB strategy, allowing it to be spread from sub-four-metre cars to the I.D. Buzz, which stretches beyond five metres.

"We are concentrating on making the battery as simple from the engineering standpoint and from the manufacturing standpoint as possible," Bischoff insisted.

"It (the battery pack) is just a flat thing like a chocolate bar and you have your modules: the more the better.

"A long wheelbase is a good thing because you can have more modules, which means more range, and we are embracing this from the design side. It's fantastic.

"For that you have to enlarge wheels and the car sits higher, and it is higher, and the seating position is higher above the ground."

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Clean-sheet design

Bischoff admits the MEB architecture also upends generations of internal-combustion thinking, with the different proportions demanding some flexible creativity to create a stand-alone EV brand that's still connected to the rest of the Volkswagen range.

"The design language, it's about this clean and sculptural approach with natural forms that you see, like a dune. If you recognise these dune shapes with these sharp lines on top, you can see this with some of the arcs that we build into some of this design," he said.

"The horizontal bars are light indicators to show the state of the charge of the car in the grille. When the car is parked somewhere, you can see from a distance whether it's still charging.

"There are some obvious links to current ICE production cars. We have to lead people in a direction. There is no sense being the only one on the moon.

"But the form can't differ very much. From law and crash and aero you land somewhere close to this. Maybe you can alter it in one or the other element, but mainly it's the same thing.

"Our credo now is form follows freedom but when you see all the products of the I.D. family in a row, you can easily recognise there is a connection between each of them.

"There are identifiers. They are all unique, but they have also a lot in common like the black roof, the polished chrome detailing.

"We have this floating surfacing, these nature-inspired shapes, the clean, purist approach, the monolithic design and proportions."