ID.4

Make
Volkswagen
Segment
SUV

Two of Volkswagen's higher-priced brands, Porsche and Audi, are currently hard at work developing a premium car platform for the future: PPE. A bit larger in size than the Volkswagen Group's flexible MEB platform for EVs, PPE, which in English stands for "Premium Platform Electric," is MEB's more upscale counterpart, ready to underpin medium- to large-sized EVs from sedans to station wagons to SUVs, including a few high-performance models.

But VW, for all its efforts to remain an affordable "people's car," is already having a look at what it might be able to do with the platform.

Volkswagen Group of America's President and CEO, Scott Keogh, confirmed as much in a conference call with members of the press on Wednesday, saying that using the premium Porsche/Audi EV platform is "certainly another avenue we're looking at."

"The important thing for us, honestly, is we're fanatical about making electrification approachable and of course hitting our price points," Keogh said, shortly after the automaker pulled the wraps off of the US-market Volkswagen ID.4 electric crossover.

"If we can hit that holy grail of getting more scale out of that platform and still hitting our price points, that's certainly something we'll look at, and [there are] a couple of projects on that platform that we're looking at as well, but nothing we're announcing just yet."

Volkswagen is betting nearly all its chips on electrification in the coming years, in anticipation of growing opportunities as EV market share swells to a forecasted 15 percent by 2025, and on to an anticipated 50 percent or more by 2040. The company has been buying up the rights to potential future EV names following its "ID" naming scheme left and right, and just recently, VW brand chief Ralf Brandstatter expressed the company's interest in entering smaller vehicle segments, and perhaps even introducing a small electric VW sports car.

But those cars, if they ever arrive, surely won't use the group's premium EV platform when its more inexpensive MEB will do. As for what VW-branded vehicles will be based on PPE, we'll just have to wait to find out.