Volkswagen’s taste of future.
The newly introduced Volkswagen BUDD-e is the much anticipated electric-concept van of the firm and it is their absolute keynote car of this year’s (Consumer Electronics Show (CES)). After a disastrous year for Volkswagen’s image on environmental issues, the firm is coming with a very strong card. At a first glimpse, the BUDD-e’s design is definitely captivating. Both interior and exterior are pretty futuristic and nice and some can assume that in the near future most of the cars will be at a similar style.
What the BUDD-e is capable of?
According to Volkswagen, the BUDD-e can be driven for 373 miles (600.3 Km) with a fully charged battery, which is a very encouraging stat for those who like to drive electric and environmentally friendly cars. Inside the cute hood there is a flat 101kWh battery that feeds the two electric motors, one on each axle powering all four wheels. We are also told by Volkswagen that the BUDD-e can reach a top speed of 93 mph (149.7 Km/h) which is quite impressing for a fully electric car. All those facts prove that the Volkswagen BUDD-e is capable for a lot of things, but are those things enough for daily use during the rush hours and the traffic that the most of world’s cities have? Well, Volkswagen promises that until the end of the decade for such batteries it will be needed 15 minutes to get them at 80 per cent and the signs are generally auspicious about the future of the electric car. If something is certain is that Volkswagen with the BUDD-e is trying to show the road of future.
Is it smart?
Some people predict that in the future, cars will somehow be another smart device in people’s life and maybe they will even replace the concept of smartphone as we know it today. Well, if you take a closer look at the Volkswagen’s BUDD-e you can conclude that Volkswagen, as a classic German firm, has again the now-how knowledge to make things possible. The proof for that, is no further than the dashboard of the car and the features the whole car gives you. In front of the driver’s seat there are three panels. One screen for the Active Info Display, a smaller one for the vehicle status and there is a third screen for more information and entertainment. For all the other passengers there is a separate head unit in which they can access music, set navigation settings and control their smart home. There is the ability to connect any smart place with your BUDD-e and watch any activity from the home’s cameras, control lighting and air-conditioning, open a door, or do remotely whatever your smart place can possibly do. Volkswagen is taking it even further and they will possibly make the BUDD-e to be able to order and receive its own replacement parts.
What about efficiency, is it really good?
Well, there are a variety of ways available to interact with the car in order to tell it what to do. You can make a gesture waving your hand to open the sliding door and a foot’s movement on the back it opens the tailgate. It also offers up an easy-open function that projects a laser footprint to help open doors. Of course you can talk to it for certain commands and it uses a touchscreen on the dashboard. The steering wheel is also without any switches and it is using instead haptic feedback. The whole interaction with driver and passengers is very sophisticated and we cannot wait to see it on real. The only new, smart feature that has to do with safety are the digital wing mirrors that eliminate the blind spots while driving. Cameras are shooting and send the streaming on a 7.9 inch screen for driver’s side and a 5.9 inch screen on the passenger side.
The real innovative characteristic and the real question.
Beside all those performance metrics and the fantastic intelligent technology with all those futuristic features, the real innovation of Volkswagen that comes with the BUDD-e is the provision of a new and complete Modular Electric Toolkit architecture specifically designed for electric cars and vehicles. More importantly is that the toolkit can be used to a variety of vehicles and seems that we are at the edge of a new era in the car industry. And who knows? Maybe in that era the BUDD-e will be something similar as the classic VW Type 2 Kombi was at its time.