SEAT IBE

QUICK SPIN

In the bright Catalan sunshine, all of its taut muscles, skin-slicing creases and triangular shapes glint with purpose. Nobody outside SEAT's Spanish design studio has even seen this car, yet so confident is SEAT of the IBE's key role in its future that we're here to drive it.

But the real purpose of this car isn't just a visual one, because this is the cutting edge of the entire electric passenger car sword of the Volkswagen Group, so that includes Audi, Volkswagen, Skoda and, yes, even Porsche.

An earlier version of this concept may have made its debut at this year's Geneva Motor Show, but this one is a very different beast. For starters, it's got its new-generation, still-secret Siemens electric motor up front under the chiseled bonnet. It's also a sharper version of Seat's design language and, unlike the Geneva car, this one's got an interior – and it's full of generation-next.

But this car is more than an electric concept and it's part of the VW Group's affirmation that electric cars shouldn't be trying to impart their moral superiority through the way they look.

"The design does not have the typical constraints of electric cars," says IBE's exterior designer, Amin Sádek García.

"It has none of the constraints of the small capacity ugly cars built to live exclusively in city traffic, either, because we are not constrained by shape, size or range of the batteries."

To highlight its electric status, SEAT filled in the grille in and lights up the logo in its centre, just as it does at the rear. Getting in is a simple job, too, but you'll have to navigate a brushed aluminium, flick-out door handle so delicate it makes an Aston's handle feel like it's come off a Caterpillar.

SEAT interior designer, Marc Franch Ventura, has gone for extreme minimalism for the cabin, which exaggerates the space you'd normally expect in a car that, at just 3.83 metres long, is shorter than the current Ibiza.

The two rear seats fold down individually to enlarge the luggage capacity and join the flat-topped rear armrest to create a large, flat floor. And yet, filled with comely Spanish maidens for demonstration purposes, they still provide decent headroom despite the slinky 1.23-metre overall height. You'll have 225 litres of luggage capacity, even with the battery mounted under the floor.

The front seats are two-piece plastic buckets, moulded in sheer white like most of the interior, but what's missing from the IBE's cabin is as interesting as what's in it. It feels like half the dashboard has been sliced away and, because it's electric, there are only Park, Drive, Neutral and Reverse buttons and they've been placed on the spindly, curved support panel that sits roughly where a traditional central tunnel would go. That also means there's no gear lever and the rules for the centre console area have been rewritten and, sources insist, this is setting the template for all future electric layouts across the group.

The other missing component in the dash is the now-ubiquitous MMI screen, which means the centre console and dashboard rules have been rewritten, too. Instead, the IBE takes advantage of the widespread use of smart phones and SEAT has written its own application so an iPhone can dock into the top of the dash and take care of the music, the navigation, traffic updates on the internet and a host of other bits and pieces. The IBE's health can also be checked online via a smart phone sending data to headquarters as well.

"The data on a personal smart phone are always up-to-date and complete, and its operation is always familiar to the owners," SEAT's electric guru, Francesc Sabaté Bastán, insisted.

"Personal smart phones can be updated inexpensively or replaced with new models, but if you do that with the vehicle through its life, it gets expensive. To take advantage of the smart phones, there are no costs compared to the deeply embedded, complex systems that you normally have in cars and it also saves weight."

If that's the case then, why not go the whole way and use an iPad or some other tablet as the entire instrument cluster?

"We want you to be able to drive the car even if your phone gets lost, that's why we don't use it as a full dashboard, even though you technically probably could with an application for an iPad," he explained.

And it works. From outside the car it seems like there's just not enough detail or work in it, but from the driver's seat, the IBE's dash is beautifully nuanced and exquisitely proportioned. Everything is driver oriented and the instrument cluster has digital readouts for the speedo and other important stuff, like its charging and discharging status but there are few other dials, switches or buttons anywhere to be found.

ALL SYSTEMS GO
It's a little difficult to know when electric cars are running because there's no idle point after you turn the key. The IBE's no different. But you adjust the seats easily with typical manual functions and, even though the seat belt feels a long way behind you, everything in the seating position feels more like it's from a sportscar than an environmentally-friendly city hatchback. You sit very low in the cabin, you can reach everything you need to without stretching away from the white leather seat and the pedals and steering wheel are both dead straight in front of you.

Then, when you push the Drive button, even more nothing happens until you push the throttle. Then there's a soft whine from the new, still-secretive Siemens electric motor and the IBE wafts its way around this curtained-off test track.

It might look Tesla-quick, but it's not. This is a car that can accelerate to 100km/h in 9.7 seconds but it looks at least three seconds quicker than that and honestly feels a couple of seconds slower.

There is no gearbox here, because SEAT has stepped down the engine speed only once to the drive wheels, so I've a feeling it might be a very noisy, whiny place to be at its claimed 160km/h top speed. And that won't help you get to SEAT's claimed 130km of maximum range before you'll need to charge it up.

Oddly, SEAT doesn't quote a 0-60km/h figure, but insists the car does the 0-50km/h burst in 3.6 seconds and gets to 80km/h in 6.6 seconds – both of which are pretty sharp urban numbers by comparison to contemporary full electric offerings.

And it feels like it's set up that way, too. Squeeze the throttle gently open and the IBE picks up speed briskly, without hurling itself forward. It does it quietly, too, though what noise there is could hardly be described as pleasant. The new electric motor produces 75kW and it has a throbbing whine to it that is probably more to do with concept-car levels of drivetrain engineering as anything inherently poor in its design and, besides, the absence of any other sound only exacerbates it.

The 19-inch tyres, hand cut for the motor show, have no noticeable noise from them and about the only other sound in the cabin comes from the typical creaks and groans from concept car bodywork that isn't quite engineered for the physical rules of the road.

The suspension, too, has concept car writ large, because the photographers insisted the wide, low stance of the IBE wasn't low enough for photography and promptly had the boffins lower it even more. Now it has the spring travel of a retractable ballpoint pen but, around the confines of SEAT's chosen test track, that's no real problem.

In fact, it makes the car more accurate, though hard cornering isn't exactly what we're here for. SEAT just wants to demonstrate that this is a real car, that it's not just a myth that SEAT is engineering itself a zero-emission future and that its new design ideas actually work in the real world.

By 2014, for example, VAG's Spanish marque will have a full, plug-in hybrid, called the Leon Twin Drive ECOMOTIVE, on sale in Europe, with technology that will also flow throughout the group. There will be 10 of them on the road by the end of this year as prototypes, but the key will be their 50km of full electric range from their lithium-ion batteries before their petrol engines ever need to kick over.

The IBE's electric motor might have less power than a two-cylinder Fiat, but electric motors are all about torque and the little unit inside the IBE has 200Nm – and it has them from the instant you push the throttle all the way to the car's top speed.

And that's how it feels, too. It stamps off in a quiet hurry at full throttle, while barely threatening to chirp the custom-built tyres, and it's always flexible on the way out of corners, too.

It feels solidly strong, rather than blisteringly quick, but then it is supposed to be a city car…

Part of the reason for the pace is the weight. It uses an 18kW/hour lithium-ion battery pack and a combination of steel and aluminium in the body to keep its weight down to 1100kg. If that sounds like a very Audi-esque solution to the problem, then there's a very good reason why…

SEAT insists there's no reason this should climb higher than around 1200kg in production and, even then, the rise would largely cover the sheet metal of production panels, because this one's plastic.

About the only things that don't quite work inside the IBE are its touch pads. They're mounted too far out on the steering spokes and you accidentally brush them with your thumbs whenever you turn into or out of a corner, so you're forever changing the music, the scale on the navigation or just turning up the volume when you don't really want to.

It's a fun kind-of car, actually, and one of the most cheerful concept cars we've ever driven. And, with zero emissions from a country whose energy production is dominated by the wind and the sun, we wish it well.

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