Wolfsburg, Germany - While revealing very little hard detail about the nuts and bolts of the upcoming T-Cross, its most compact crossover yet, Volkswagen has released this video showing how the designers went about fulfilling one of the most import facets of the design brief.
It had to be practical, it had to be safe, it had to be intuitive and it had to be cool.
Practical and safe are the province of the engineers; Volkswagen has lots of experience with that. Intuitive comes down to ergonomics; the designers spent a lot of time wearing augmented reality goggles, sitting in virtual models of the interior, making sure everything was in the right place and worked the right way.
Cool was much more difficult. Cool has to do with shapes, colours and textures; unless your surname is McQueen, cool cannot be measured.
So they tweaked Volkswagen’s current design language to give the body more bulk - without actually making it any bigger - by integrating the front rim of the bonnet and the headlight clusters into the grille outline, matched by a black rim with a narrow red stripe running between the tail-lights to create a firm line right across the back of the car, and a crisp hard-edged character line down the side to underscore the glazed area.
The interior designers opted for a two-colour approach (plain black or very dark grey is only cool on high-performance models, and then only with brightly-coloured contrast stitching), with each combination linked to a specific exterior paint colour - and then they persuaded the exterior guys to create a couple of optional two-tone paint schemes as well.
Volkswagen’s new urban warrior will make its world debut during the third quarter of 2018 and will go on sale in Europe during the first half of 2019. As soon as we hear more details, so will you.