VW Designer Reveals Sketches Of Abandoned Sports Car Proposal

VW’s on-again-off-again plans to launch a sports car during the 2000s and 2010s was one of the car industry’s most frustrating will-they-won't-they stories. While show cars like the Concept R and BlueSport promised lots, none of them would ever make it past the concept stage, leaving the Scirocco as the closest thing to a proper sports car in the company’s lineup.

Now, it seems unlikely that the company will launch any sort of new coupe or convertible anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean the desire ever went away among its designers. As spotted by Motor1, VW’s head design spokesperson Stepan Rehak recently hopped on LinkedIn to show off a never-before-seen sketch of a retrofuturist electric sports car, penned by designer Tibor Juhasz in 2017.

At the time, Volkswagen, still reeling from the effects of the Dieselgate scandal, was full steam ahead with development of its MEB EV platform, which now underpins its ID-badged range of electric cars.

The car in these sketches – envisioned as part of the ID range – was designed to sit on that platform, and like the ID Buzz, draws inspiration from one of VW’s historic air-cooled models. It might not be one you’re overly familiar with, though, unless you’re from Brazil.

Developed by the company’s Brazilian subsidiary and sold there for a short run between 1972 and 1975, the SP2 might have had sports car looks, but it definitely didn’t have the performance to match, since it was based on largely unaltered Beetle mechanicals. Still, it’s become a bit of a cult classic among VW heads, which is likely why Juhasz chose to reference it with this design.

Now, it’s fairly common practice for car designers to sketch out proposals for cars they know full well don’t have much of a shot at production, so we don’t know if this pretty little electric reimagining of the SP2 was ever a serious candidate for production. That said, we can’t help but imagine it as a halo for the ID range, maybe with the 321bhp, rear-wheel drive powertrain and fancy adaptive damping from the ID3 GTX, and be a little sad that a sketch was all it ever remained.