Enlarge / You don't have to get a two-tone paint job on your ID Buzz, but it helps. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Volkswagen's forthcoming electric minivan couldn't be better named. Simply put, in the years that we've been writing about cars, nothing on four wheels has created quite as much buzz as the VW ID Buzz with its adorably retro styling. But if all that attention translates into actual buyers, the electric microbus may end up being oversubscribed, at least to begin with.

Charlie Hall, chairman of the Volkswagen National Dealer Advisory Council, says the US may only see 20,000 ID Buzzes imported this year, according to an interview today in Automotive News . "It sounds like we may have the opportunity for additional European capacity if we need it, but we're still trying to sort out where the demand is going to be globally," Hall said.

Years in the making

VW's plan to resurrect the iconic T1 Microbus goes back to 2001 during the industry's flirtation with retro car design. While vehicles like the new VW Beetle, Ford's porthole-a-licious Thunderbird, and the ever-customizable Chrysler PT Cruiser made it to production, the Microbus concept never did.

Enlarge / The VW plant in Wolfsburg, Germany. (credit: Volkswagen)

The Volkswagen passenger car brand looks set to lay off workers, according to a report in Reuters . The news organization saw a post on VW's intranet quoting CEO Thomas Schaffer, who blamed low productivity and high costs for the impending cuts.

"With many of our pre-existing structures, processes and high costs, we are no longer competitive as the Volkswagen brand," Schaffer said at a staff meeting.

VW accounts for the highest volume among the different brands owned by VW Group but is much less profitable than either Audi or Porsche. In June, VW Group announced a $10.9 billion (10 billion euro) cost-cutting plan for the namesake brand.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

In 2019, Volkswagen Group had a bold plan. After proving that it made sense to use a few common architectures to design a varied range of vehicles across multiple different brands, it decided to apply that same approach to software. It set up a new division and moved the entire VW Group's software development under that roof, with a mandate to create a new unified automotive operating system for future VW Group EVs.

In fact, the division had to work on three different systems simultaneously. Called E ³ for end-to-end architecture, E ³ 1.1 would be the software to run on VW Group's MEB platform for mass-market EVs. Cars using this software are now on the road, including the VW ID.4, Audi Q4 e-tron, and of course, everyone's favorite, ID. Buzz. E ³ 1.2 is destined for more upmarket EVs from Audi and Porsche, using the upcoming PPE platform. And that unified OS, called E ³ 2.0, would show up mid-decade in a new, unified platform across the entire VW Group .

It hasn't exactly gone smoothly. In 2020 VW replaced Christian Senger as the head of the division—called Car.Software.Org, now called CARIAD—with Dirk Hilgenberg. By 2022, problems with CARIAD's development and buggy software for the launch of the ID.3 and ID.4 EVs saw VW Group fire its chairman , Herbert Diess, along with multiple reports of delays to future group vehicles , including the electric Porsche Macan . The division cost VW Group more than $2 billion last year in the process.

Enlarge / Modern VWs are equipped with an SOS button that connects to emergency services. Now it's making the service free for five years. (credit: Volkswagen)

Last month, Volkswagen garnered plenty of bad publicity when it emerged that the company's connected car service refused to help track a stolen car—with a 2-year-old child still on board—until someone paid to reactivate the service. Now, the automaker says it's very sorry this happened, and it's making its connected vehicle emergency service free to most model-year 2020-2023 Volkswagens.

The toddler-containing car—a 2021 VW Atlas—was stolen from its owner's driveway in Libertyville, Illinois, after thieves jumped out of a white BMW and assaulted her, seriously injuring her as they drove over her in their escape, according to the Lake County sheriff's office.

The police immediately contacted VW Car-Net, the connected car service, in order to track the stolen Atlas. But since the Atlas' Car-Net trial subscription had ended, the representative would not provide the location of the stolen vehicle until the service had been reactivated at the cost of $150.

Enlarge / VW used QR codes to camouflage the shape of its new ID.7 sedan for its CES debut. (credit: Volkswagen)

On Tuesday in Las Vegas, Volkswagen revealed its next fully electric model destined for North America. Well, a somewhat-camouflaged version, at any rate—the show car wears an electroluminescent QR code livery for its debut at this year's Consumer Electronics Show.

The new sedan, called the ID.7, will go on sale in the US in 2024 after the official production car is unveiled later this fall. As its name suggests, the ID.7 is part of VW's new family of electric vehicles that use the company's new modular platform called MEB (Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten or Modular Electrification Toolkit), which we've tested in the ID.4 crossover as well as the ID. Buzz van .

The ID.7 will be aimed above the ID.4 in the marketplace. (credit: Volkswagen)

Like the ID.4, the ID.7 will be built at Emden in Germany, and like that crossover, it will be a global EV for VW, on sale in Europe and China as well as the US. (Europe also gets an ID.3 hatchback and an ID.5 crossover, and the ID.6 is a larger crossover just for the Chinese market.)