Second Coming

With the shift towards electric mobility picking up steam with each passing day, the world’s largest carmaker – Volkswagen – has finally revealed its plan regarding electric vehicles. So, we take a deep dive into the new all-electric MEB architecture to see just how important it is to the survival of the VW Group.

- Ishan Raghava

‘MEB is one of the most important projects in the history of Volkswagen – a technological milestone, similar to the transition from the Beetle to the Golf.’ This is a line from Volkswagen’s press release on the MEB platform. And it tells you all that you need to know about how seriously the brand is taking its shift towards electric mobility, and, more importantly, how they think that customer preferences will change over the next couple of decades.

The MEB platform is VW’s attempt to produce mass-market electric vehicles in large numbers to satisfy a wider audience. Through extensive engineering breakthroughs and technology upgrades, VW is also trying to address concerns that currently plague electric vehicles – but we’ll come to that later. Now, the scale of what Volkswagen hopes to achieve with MEB can be simply understood by the fact that the company hopes to sell 150,000 electric vehicles by 2020. And, more importantly, it expects 10 million vehicles to be built on the electric-only MEB platform in its first iteration – a lofty ambition indeed. At the same time, by the end of 2022, the various brands of the Group will produce 22 vehicles on the MEB platform alone – ranging from compact cars to the lifestyle focused Bulli minivan.