Volkswagen is extending the I.D. concept family it debuted at the Paris Motor Show earlier this year with a new concept car in the same line to be fully revealed at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in January. The carmaker teased the concept today, revealing a few details about the car, including that it’s designed to be fully self-driving in the future.
The new addition to the I.D. family will also be a fully electric vehicles, based on Volkswagen’s new Modular Electric Drive (MEB) base, which is the new platform Volvo is using as the anchor for its plan to diversify and expand its EV line to over 30 models introduces over the coming decade.
This new concept looks like it’ll be much more future-focused than the I.D. unveiled at the Paris Motor Show, which Volkswagen said will eventually become the first production vehicle based on its MEB. It’s truly designed for autonomy – there’s a steering wheel on board, but it vanishes when the user pushes the VW logo buttoning its center, retracting into the dash to provide more room for the driver to stretch out.
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It sounds like a design that’s truly looking to articulate a real vision of how we might use our vehicles in a post-driving world. No doubt it’ll also be a long time before we see anything like this on the road, but watching how VW’s thinking about incorporating autonomous tech into consumer vehicles is still interesting.