£22,000 Volkswagen ID 2 gives blueprint for cheap electric cars

With both lines planned for 150,000 vehicles each, that’s 300,000 capacity annually for cars with very similar underpinnings. Although they will look outwardly different at launch, 50% of the parts will be shared between models, VW’s head of manufacturing, Christian Vollmer told Autocar Business. “With the high scaling effect of those four cars, we will bring down the cost to less than €25,000,” he said.

The sub-€25,000 promise has a sleight-of-hand element, because only the ID 2 hatchback will start from that target price, Schäfer said at the concept unveiling. The Urban Rebel is a more premium model, thanks to its more sporty agenda, while the second VW and the Skoda will be SUVs, which also command a higher price. Schäfer hinted at a GTI version of the ID 2 as well, pushing average prices higher and helping VW achieve its 6% profit-margin target.

Then there’s the production simplicity arising from reduced options and variants. This has been a common theme for EVs as manufacturers try to push down prices and the ID 2 will be the same. “The Polo today has 110 million different combinations. That’s crazy,” Vollmer said. That will be reduced to mere “hundreds” for the ID 2, he added.

The battery for entry-level models will be lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP), a cheaper and more robust chemistry popularised for cars by Chinese makers. They will be built for these models by the VW Group itself at its planned new battery factory in Valencia, Spain, with initial batteries coming from another VW battery plant at Salzgitter, Germany. 

Cars with LFP batteries will travel less far on a charge than the claimed 304 miles for the longest-range model, which will use nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) chemistry, but should reach 200 miles. 

Both chemistries will be incorporated into VW’s new Unified battery, which VW touts as another weapon in the battle against EV prices. “We're going to scale the new Unified cell across all models, factory by factory. That will give us a real cost advantage,” Schäfer said. “We think it’s going to be the industry standard going forward.”

LFP chemistry will also power the ID 1, Schäfer said. But this is trickier. LFP is less power-dense than NMC, so you need to package the battery well or you won’t fit enough cells on board for an adequate range. This is Dacia’s problem with the Spring electric city car, which is too space-constricted to use LFP, despite being made in China, where LFP battery suppliers are currently concentrated.

Fitting LFP batteries in order to reduce the final price while still giving a decent range on a car costing less than €20,000 is a platform-design challenge. This won’t be another chop of the MEB platform but will instead be all-new. VW could even partner with someone, much in the same way BMW has done with Great Wall Motor for the platform of the new Chinese-built electric Mini Cooper. 

“Either you solve the riddle with scale, downsize the battery, or you go partnering and scale it even more. It’s not clear yet,” Schäfer said.