Volkswagen has gone back to the drawing board for its long-awaited ID 2 urban EV, providing its smallest electric car with a completely new exterior and interior that are set to be previewed on a new concept car in March.
Scheduled to go on sale in 2025 at a targeted base price of €22,500 (cAUD$35,000) in today’s money, the compact five-seater is being lined up to get the Golf name, according to Wolfsburg insiders.
Automotive Daily Network partner Autocar says sources have also confirmed that the Volkswagen ID 2 will be the first VW based on the MEB-Plus platform – an updated version of today’s widely used MEB electric car structure that features new LFP (lithium iron phosphate) prismatic battery cells and charging speeds of up to 200kW, among other developments.
Nothing is official at this stage, but Autocar has been told that a number of different naming combinations for the production version of the ID 2 have been proposed in internal meetings in recent months, including the ID Golf nomenclature first alluded to by Volkswagen CEO Thomas Schäfer in an interview with Autocar in October 2022.
At the time, Schäfer, who took control of Volkswagen in July after his predecessor, Ralf Brandstätter, was appointed to head up the company’s Chinese operations, said: “The Golf name has huge value. The recognition it receives at [customer] clinics – people absolutely understand what we are talking about. So to change the name to something completely different doesn’t make sense.”
The initial suggestions were that the Golf name may be reserved for a facelifted version of the Volkswagen ID 3. However, this is denied by Autocar sources, who say “the true value of the Volkswagen Golf lies in a car the size of the ID 2”.
In place of the controversial crossover design previewed by the VW ID Life concept at the 2020 Munich motor show, the heavily revised VW ID 2 is set to receive a more conventional hatchback shape developed by a team of designers under the guidance of Volkswagen’s new design boss, Andreas Mindt.
The move comes after what has been described to Autocar as a “less than lukewarm” reception to the original crossover design – developed by Mindt’s predecessor, Jozef Kaban – by Schäfer and Volkswagen’s new management team.
After much internal debate over the original design of the upcoming price-leading EV, Kaban was asked to step aside. He had been Volkswagen’s design boss since 2020 and has now become the firm’s new creative art director.
The decision to provide the new car with a hatchback shape comes after Cupra revealed that the ID 2’s sibling model, the Urban Rebel, will receive a similar styling treatment.
The two models are due to be produced at Seat’s Martorell factory near Barcelona as indirect replacements for the Volkswagen Up and Seat Mii. A similarly conceived model from Skoda atop the same architecture is also planned to arrive at a later date.