The Car Design Event is an annual get-together held at The Loh Collection in Dietzhölztal, Germany and this year it was more electrifying than ever. While the automotive museum is largely dedicated to pleasing petrolheads with a veritable mountain of the best and rarest metal to pick through, the Car Design Event cleverly fuses the past with the present.
Case in point is the Volkswagen T1 Samba Bus (pictured above) which on face value is a beautifully restored mid-1960s classic transporter. Underneath, however, the humble VW has been transformed with an electric powertrain. The only real giveaway was the automatic transmission shifter between the seats.
Engineers cunningly crafted the electric motor from a VW e-Up and have powered it with a 45kWh lithium-ion battery pack, good for around 125 miles that can be charged at up to 50kW. Admittedly, the VW bus was never rapid in the first place, but thanks to the electric motor, power has effectively been doubled. It’s still essentially a cruiser, but the 82 horsepower and around 212Nm of torque makes it surprisingly zesty to drive.
Meanwhile, inside the huge museum, the event also saw the European premiere of the Hyundai Earth and Venus concepts. The former had some of the wildest inflatable seats we’ve ever seen. Made of recycled plastics, they easily matched the rest of the unique styling. Nicola Danza, Head of Exterior Design at the Hyundai EU Studio also promised more wacky creations from his department, noting that “there are plenty of planets”.
Elsewhere, Genesis had an impressive line-up on show. This included the X Gran Convertible Magma Concept with its unbelievable orange interior and the Genesis Magma GT Concept, all topped off with a showcase of the Genesis Box Buggy. The latter even did a few classy pirouettes on its beefy balloon tyres, each fitted with their own electric motor, to underline that not all of the cars were all show and no go.
While the Genesis Box Buggy looked like something legendary US custom car builder George Barris could have created, similarly ‘out there’ but bang up to date was the very quirky Volkswagen Mission Efficiency car. Based on the MEB+ electric platform, the car has garnered lots of attention since it covered no less than 794 miles on one charge during a trip from Wolfsburg to Vienna. A big part of that is down to its incredible 0.158 drag coefficient as well as the driver’s featherlight touch that managed to squeeze 9.59 miles per kilowatt hour from the battery en route. Better still, much of this creation could end up in a production-ready car in the not-too-distant future. Range anxiety? Pah!
We even managed to get a lift to the event in the new Mercedes-Benz 600SL, which is quite possibly the best way to get to anything, especially when you’re relaxing in the back… Stunning. If you’re ever out in the sticks in Germany, keep an eye out for signs to Nationales Automuseum, The Loh Collection, which is in Dietzhölztal. It really is something else.
