Finally some good Volkswagen news! VW is considering going into production with an EV sports car it has already designed. It is to be based on its MEB platform which it seems like will underpin anything and everything that is future VW-related. So, if true the chassis will have similar dimensions to the ID 3 hatchback which is not coming to the US. We get the ID 4. We’ll assume that VW wants a combat Tesla’s second-gen sports car it is ready to launch this year.

If it looks anything like past sports cars VW has dabbled with it should look great. A little backstory. VW has been popping out concept sports cars with some frequency. It even went into very limited production on two of them; the XL series it produced in the mid-2010s. Two versions were built with a limited production of 250 units each. We never understood the whole XL limited-production reasoning but I’ll get to that in another post. That was the past. We’re looking ahead here.

VW considering everything underpinned by the MEB EV platform so a sports car seems logical

Like we said VW wants to see everything under the sun running its MEB electric platform and has plans for a number of segments. The hatchback, utility city van, Microbus van-thing, and now a sports car. Maybe a truck would help round out its “MEBs for everybody” philosophy but VW doesn’t seem to be pickup friendly. 

VW calls its performance MEB version “R” so this would be an ID R sports car. That is the basis for the next Audi TT. Yes, it will only be an EV. This could be VW’s TT so to speak. 

Could this new EV sports car be similar to the next Porsche Boxster?

Porsche is also working on a new Boxster. At this point, it could be based on the Taycan’s PPE platform, adapted from the existing ICE platform, or quite possibly share a little or a lot with the ID R. Let’s hope that if there is this much platform sharing that the resulting sports cars won’t have similar looks.

Supposedly a few designs were considered and one has already been chosen. The interesting part is that VW Motorsports Director Sven Smeets says there is already a new performance-based battery that exists. The significance of a specialized battery is that aggressive battery use depletes the charge quicker than taking it easy. So a performance battery would be up for this specialized use. He says a future ID R road car will be the first to receive the performance battery. 

A “performance battery” would be an interesting sub-division of the VW ID series

Smeets told Autocar, “We are beginning to work on the first batteries for the performance road cars using the dedicated team from the ID R so there will be a direct link between them. At the moment we’re finalizing the performance parameters of the batteries.”

The performance battery uses a different chemical process from ID entries so far. It also uses a new cell-to-pack construction for better packaging and efficiency. The all-wheel-drive Golf eR1 was a predecessor to the ID R Pikes Peak Hillclimb car. This was an all-wheel-drive EV with a twin motor powertrain.

VW has been developing this EV performance battery for a few years

All of these EVs used some version of the performance battery so VW has been developing this for the last several years. The R series will be the top performance brand, above the GTX brand which is like the GTI of ICE models.

In all this is exciting news and fun to speculate. As we get closer to more concrete info we’ll pass it along.