Volkswagen design boss Andreas Mindt is reshaping the ID family. We caught him in a positively candid mood at IAA, Munich last month.

When Andreas Mindt swapped the gilded world of Bentley for the bread-and-butter pragmatism of Volkswagen, he knew it would mean trading gold-plated gear knobs for cost-cut dashboards.

- 

At Crewe, he once signed off on an €18,000 printed gold selector for the Batur – "and most customers wanted it, because it was gold and so special!" At Wolfsburg, the equation flipped. "Investment doesn't matter. It's the other way around... single cost matters a lot. You have to bring down the single cost of every millimetre or every part so as to achieve our goals."

Yet that doesn't mean VW customers miss out on flair. Mindt has smuggled in a few Bentley tricks, like the two-tone steering wheel from the ID.Cross show car. "I liked it so much that I wanted to bring it to Volkswagen and now we have it," he says. The point, he insists, isn't luxury for its own sake but a deeper understanding of history and brand character. His baptism of fire at VW was the ID.4. Mindt joined on February 1st and had just six weeks to lay down design values, strategy and a full show car. "Six weeks is all I had... but now we have our pathway and we know what we want to achieve and it's been very successful." That sprint has since given way to more considered work. He points to the ID.Every1 as proof. "It's a stronger design than the ID.Polo because we had more time to think about it... we deleted all the claddings, all the plastic parts are gone. You see a lot of French and Korean cars with cladding all over the place but we wanted to reduce. It saves money... and the result is more value for the customer."