SKODA

The company announced that it will progressively electrify its vehicle line

Skoda recently issued a press release reaffirming its commitment to making its business more sustainable and progressively electrifying its vehicle range.

The announcement also confirmed that the Czech manufacturer, owned by the Volkswagen Group, will launch three all-new electric vehicles by 2026 and expects that 70% of vehicles sold will be fully electric by the end of the decade, as it will switch to selling electric vehicles only after 2035. .

Of the three new Skoda electric vehicles, we know that one of them will be a small crossover that the brand has already announced and that will be twinned with models from Volkswagen and SEAT.

This smaller electric offer will be built on a simplified version of the MEB platform, called MEB Lite, and that unlike vehicles manufactured on the standard version of the platform, those developed on the Lite version will be front-wheel drive in their basic versions (ID.3 and ID.4).

The second model could be an all-electric replacement for the current Octavia, which reportedly ditches the MEB platform Skoda uses to underpin the Enyaq crossover (now also available as the sleeker Enyaq Coupe), and will be built on top of the new bespoke EV architecture. of the Volkswagen group called SSP (whose name is the abbreviation of Scalable Systems Platform).

This platform is important because Volkswagen considers it as the architecture that will replace its current thermal platforms, as well as MEB and PPE (Premium Platform Electric, which is used in the new Porsche Macan EV and Audi Q6 E-tron models), providing a single solution for a wide range of vehicle styles.

It's worth noting that Skoda may not have been referring to the hypothetical electric replacement for the Octavia. Previous reports indicated that the three new electric cars would be a subcompact model, a compact SUV and a larger seven-seat crossover, which the company teased with the Vision 7S concept (pictured), which was unveiled earlier this year.

The Vision 7S concept also gives us a pretty good idea of where Skoda's design is headed in the next decade, as it reveals the major corporate identity update the brand has in store.

In other words, it anticipates the basic aesthetics of all the models that will be presented at the end of the decade and possibly beyond, so in terms of design studies, this one is quite significant.

Autonews