This little Volkswagen is being touted by the German marque as an all-electric car that will show Tesla a thing or two, which is a little odd because Tesla already has a couple of popular cars on the market with more on the way. It's especially odd considering the ID concept, or it's offspring, will only make it to the marketplace in around three years time, in 2020. Still, we had a close look at the car here at the Paris Motor Show and it does look good. Most concepts here at the show are overly futuristic, but the ID looks street ready.

It looks like a mix between the Beetle and the diminutive UP! model, which can be seen on Europe's streets as a full electric car, the e-UP!. The ID isn't just an EV offering, it should be able to go full autonomous by 2025 too thanks to a feature called ID Pilot that retracts the steering wheel for driverless operation. This looks cool as we saw when we got up close to the ID, but we'd prefer an autonomous car to keep its direction chooser in place in case things go south and you need to take the wheel. VW call the interior Open Space, which it has, thanks to the battery and motor location. All functions will be accessible by any passenger, it's not all in the console.

The headlights are like eyes, park and the LED lights close to thin strips; charge it and they pulse blue; drive and they're wide open again. If you have a fleet of them you can save the ID's configuration to your smartphone and when you change cars, you simply connect to the profile to update all the settings, returning the car just how you like it with preferred seating position, climate control, playlists and more. It's yet another car that looks like an Apple device that you can drive, but a lot more user friendly and something we would actually drive. Let's hope we don't find out it has a gasoline-powered lump hidden in there somewhere and it's pretending to be an EV.