PARIS MOTOR SHOW: Volkswagen's EV for the masses

The Volkswagen I.D. concept car, shown overnight at a private function in Paris ahead of today's motor show, previews the first in a fleet of all-new electric production cars from the under-siege German company.

The car industry’s most notorious emitter is determined to sell a million battery-electric cars a year by 2025 (assuming the US Department of Justice doesn’t fine it into bankruptcy) and the I.D. will lead the way.

To be sold alongside the next-generation Golf Mk8 from 2020, the I.D. concept already has Volkswagen’s all-new dedicated battery-electric vehicle architecture beneath its skin.

Dubbed Modular Electric Drive (MEB), it will be scalable almost infinitely, up beyond Passat size and down to the sub-Polo segments, with equally scalable lithium-ion battery packs.

Volkswagen is claiming the production I.D. will deliver 125kW of power and will be capable of driving between 400km and 600km on a single full charge, depending on the size of the battery pack its driver purchases.

The car-maker promises the I.D., which was teased in the lead-up to the show, will have at least the same grip levels and active safety as the Golf, and has focused heavily on crash safety as well.

The I.D. will also be the pathfinder for design, boasting the first example of the brand’s all-new, electric car-specific design language.

Though there are strong hints of BMW i3 from the rear three-quarter angle, the I.D. looks and feels cleaner even than the Golf.

That’s partly down to its flush-fit door-handles (two of which operate the sliding rear doors) and the replacement of the traditional rear-view mirrors with a camera-based system.

It uses razor-thin OLED tail-lights that keep the focus on the car’s width, while the nose is dominated by what’s not there, rather than what is. It has no traditional grille, for example, and tiny LED and OLED headlights.

The I.D. is said by Volkswagen to be the car that will close the gap between assisted driving systems and fully autonomous driving, with the brand insisting the car will be fully autonomous by 2025.

There is no traditional steering wheel, judging by the limited interior view Volkswagen has given us so far, which seems to prove its autonomous point, and the interior is clean to the point of having no buttons at all.

There is just one screen in front of the driver and nothing in the middle of the centre console, while the floor area is flat throughout. At the rear, it has similar luggage capacity to the Golf, though it has another trick in its ability to open up a secure luggage area to accept parcels from couriers.

Volkswagen sources insist the I.D. boasts an interior that is similar in size to the Passat while remaining Golf-sized on the outside, though the computer-generated images of the interior don’t suggest it has a lot of rear legroom.

It also has four strange circles on each corner of its roof and though Volkswagen won’t say yet what they’re for, it could be anything from a set of wireless antennas to transmit information to infrastructure like traffic lights.

It could also be part of a high-speed internet system Volkswagen is planning to use to give detailed real-time information to keep the HERE maps up to date, suggesting it’s pre-engineered for a high degree of autonomous driving.

The I.D. won’t be Volkswagen’s first electric car, because it has two fully battery-electric vehicles in production today, though neither of them have yet been confirmed for Australia.