Here’s your first look at Volkswagen’s cheapest electric car: the sub-£17k ‘ID.One’

This is the new Volkswagen… ID.One, at least according to the licence plate on this new preview image. While VW hasn’t confirmed the name, it has confirmed the price, and in Germany this chonky little citymobile will cost around €20,000 – that’s less than £17k.

Which looks like a good price. Looks like a good face, too – determined, focused, possibly silently judging your life choices. We’ll see the rest of this so-called ‘ID.One’ at the beginning of March as a ‘show car’: read, ‘cute little concept that you’ll no doubt want immediately’.

It’ll be spun off a version of VW’s MEB platform… which will also underpin the ID.2 electric car. The production version of that ID.2 will arrive first in 2026 with a price of around €25k (under £21k), before this ID.One arrives in 2027 for even less money.

Speaking at the company’s Wolfsburg home, VW boss Thomas Schäfer said: “An affordable, high-quality, profitable electric Volkswagen from Europe for Europe. This is the Champions League of automobile manufacturing.”

And speaking of manufacturing, he said by moving the Golf to Mexico, the Wolfsburg plant’s ‘Hall 54’ would be dedicated to building the “electric Golf successor” and electric T-Roc, both of which will sit on the company’s new ‘Scalable Systems Platform’.

That, for the platform enthusiasts out there, is VW’s next-gen all-electric “highly scalable mechatronics platform based on a uniform system architecture”. Woof.

“We will be making Wolfsburg the capital of our new all-electric compact class,” Schäfer added.