Volkswagen is putting this cool electric station wagon into production

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  We’ve seen buses and buggies, hatches, sedans, and crossovers. And now there’s a VW ID station wagon concept. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

LOS ANGELES—Buzz. Crozz. Buggy. Vizzion. And now Space Vizzion. No, I haven’t overdosed on the letter Z; those are the slightly wacky names for a series of not-at-all-wacky electric ID concept cars from Volkswagen, the newest of which was just unveiled on Tuesday night in Los Angeles. The ID Space Vizzion is the latest installment in an electrification push from one of the world’s largest automakers, one aiming to sell 20 million electric cars worldwide over the next 10 years.

Volkswagen Group had little choice but to embrace electric powertrains in the aftermath of dieselgate—the alternative would be failing to meet 2021’s European CO2 rules, which would result in billions of dollars in fines. Audi and Porsche, the two big premium brands within the group, got their battery EVs to market first. The first of these—the Audi e-tron—is mainly a stop-gap, a Q8 with batteries and two electric motors in place of the normal internal combustion engine stuff. The Porsche Taycan had an extra year to gestate, and is all the better for it, a mostly clean-sheet design that’s wowed everyone who’s driven it.

Meanwhile, over at VW (the brand, not the group) the engineers were working on MEB (Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten, or Modular Electrification Toolkit), which it will use to build millions of BEVs over the next decade. VW has long embraced the use of modular architectures; its current MQB (Modularer Querbaukasten, or Modular Transverse Toolkit) gives rise to such diverse cars as the VW Atlas and Audi TT-RS. And MEB should be even more flexible, as the various ID concept cars have shown.