Looking at the new Volkswagen ID. 2all concept car on the stage in Hamburg, you'd swear it was almost the finished item, ready to be rolled out into a nearby dealership.
Well, that's simply not the case. In fact, the ID. 2all was something of a rush job, as Andreas Mindt, VW's recently-appointed chief designer, told CompleteCar.ie.
Mindt started his new role at the end of January, giving him a tiny timeframe to create the new concept.
"Six weeks," Mindt tells us in Germany. "I started on the 1st of February, and here we are in the middle of March. And in between we made this new car here. It's incredible. There's a lot of 3D printed parts on the car, and the new technology helps a lot, but at the same time you have to be on point, you have to make up your mind very quickly."
Mindt was brought in from his previous job at Bentley to replace Jozef Kabaň, whose design for the initial concept of a small ID-badged electric model, the boxy ID. Life crossover, didn't go down well enough with the public or the VW board.
The ID. 2all bins the crossover look in favour of something that's much more obviously a hatchback with, dare we say it, some flavour of previous Golf models in it? Indeed, if the badges you slapped on it before rolling it into a dealer said 'Golf', we wouldn't be surprised...
Mindt admits that the Golf was a major influence on the ID. 2all, but points out that there's more than just Golf in its makeup.
"Yeah, that's true but it's not only Golf", he said. "There's a lot of elements from the Beetle as well, like the exposed wheelarches at the front and at the rear. They make the car look really sporty and strong. I love that, you know, the fact that it's a box, but it's a sporty-looking box."
As for how much like the final, finished, on-sale car - whatever it will be called by then - Mindt says that the concept is about 80 per cent there but wouldn't go further than that when we asked which 20 per cent was missing.
The concept also lacks a functional interior, but one has been made in buck form at VW design, and of this, Mindt is especially proud. "We have a lot of really nice materials to avoid the plasticky feeling. The materials are really high quality. We have some details that are very tactile, like the steering wheel switches and the rotary control for the screen, so it's not only digital. Because some people dislike that, the digital-only route. And you have to catch everybody. We say that it's in the name ID. 2all, it's for everybody. And so you have to pitch everybody."
Mindt also loved the opportunity to include some playful options in the digital screens, such as a radio screen for the centre of the dash that mimics the Bakelite speaker of a 1950s Beetle, and the option to have digital recreations of classic Beetle or Golf instruments in front of the driver.
Hopefully, such playfulness will make it through to production, but it's more than mere digital joking about - the references to the Beetle and Golf, both on the outside and the inside, are there for a purpose. They're to underline that this will be a genuinely affordable model, an electric car everyone can afford.
"When you look back six or seven years ago, the electric car was a pioneering car," says Mindt. "Now, this age is over. We are going to a broader audience. That is exactly what this car is made for - a broader audience. It's not polarising. It's a new standard for us; from here we do things differently, and that's the hardest part. To create a new standard."
Read our news story on the Volkswagen ID. 2all concept and watch the video