Yahoo Autos Volkswagen's Beetle Could Morph into an Electric Four-Door
The Volkswagen Beetle hasn’t stolen the limelight in some time, but its appeal could soon be in for a sweet kick in the pants. Rumors are swirling (fed by this Autocar report) that the Bug’s replacement could be headed for the zapper, electrified and rendered on VW’s new MEB modular EV platform as a four-door hatchback as shown in this illustration.
Why is this a big deal? The once plucky People’s Car that birthed VW and lifted its formerly government-run operations from postwar Germany’s industrial ruins in the late 1940s is one of the bestselling cars of all time. Sold well beyond its expiration date, the original was succeeded here in the United States by the front-drive New Beetle in 1998-several years before VW stopped producing the old-school Bug for South American markets. That Baby Boomer–tastic New Beetle was the breed’s last big hurrah, as the model-appropriately stripped of its adjectival New moniker-has since grown into a relatively large, weirdly packaged two-door hatchback cobbled together from Golf and Jetta underpinnings.
Resetting the Beetle franchise as an EV would be a clever way to drag the iconic car’s persona into the present and future. It could also help VW counter its retro-rival Mini, which plans an EV variant for 2019.
Volkswagen executives, in interviews with us this year, have echoed Autocar’s reporting, musing about the possibility of moving the Beetle to the brand’s all-new MEB electric architecture to bring some “emotion” to the planned family of I.D. EV models-which will make up a handful of the 50 EVs that the Volkswagen Group has targeted for 2025 across all of its brands. This full-court electric press begins with the I.D. hatchback and a compact electric crossover, followed in 2022 by another blast from the past: the electric I.D. Buzz, a Microbus redux.
We say bring on the juiced Bug. It crosses one of those 50 EV models off the list, and according to VW folks we’ve spoken to, the MEB architecture likely would return the Beetle to its ancestral layout: rear-wheel drive with its motor mounted in back. Only, instead of an air-cooled flat-four gas engine in its tail, there’d be an electric motor, and rather than a fuel tank ahead of the passenger compartment, there’d be batteries in the floor.
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Autocar speculates that the electric Bug might take the form of a four-door hatchback, given its assured relationship with the I.D. hatch. Considering that the original Beetle qualified, in its day, as a sedan (albeit a two-door), we doubt many folks will be hung up on door counts. As for timing, that might get Beetle fans in a knot-VW is expected to roll out core I.D. models first before turning to fun projects such as the I.D. Buzz bus and a possible Beetle reboot.
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