VW electric dune buggy – a pre-Geneva teaser

Volkswagen have gone public with some teaser images of the new electric dune buggy. It looks suitably groovy and ripe for some (almost silent) ’70s-style fun, with its doorless, big-wheeled body shell.

Tearing himself away from an admiring crowd of bikini-clad, sufboard-toting beach babes, VW design head Klaus Bischoff explained: “A buggy is more than a car. It is vibrancy and energy on four wheels. These attributes are embodied by the new e-buggy, which demonstrates how a modern, non-retro interpretation of a classic can look and, more than anything else, the emotional bond that electric mobility can create.”

The more serious side, however, is that, replicating the adaptability of the Beetle chassis that underpinned almost every buggy from its heyday (the Meyers Manx being the best-known), the new dune buggy is a showcase for the flexibility of Volkswagen’s MEB EV skateboard platform.

“The new MEB concept vehicle shows that this fully electric platform can be used for more than just large-scale series production models,” said the company. “Like the Beetle chassis of yesteryear, the MEB has the potential to facilitate the development of low-volume niche vehicles.”

The buggy follows on from several other raids on the company’s heritage archive, most notably the ID Buzz (below), the retro-styled EV which was first shown in Detroit in 2017, and is now slated for production.