“It was yellow, I still know the numberplate and can still recall the smell and the sound.” Mindt learned to drive in a diesel Golf (“if you let the clutch out too early you’d just kill the engine; it was the hardest car to learn in”), and bought himself a Beetle as his first car for 500 Deutschmarks.
“It was the cheapest car you could get,” he says. Mindt still owns a 1970 version today.
So when Mindt was given just six weeks to design a concept for a small electric VW but within considerable constraints (it had to sit on the running gear of the much-maligned ID Life concept), he had already been thinking about it for decades.
“I started my job in February,” he says, “and in the middle of March we had the presentation. I had to start running; it was jumping into the water no matter the temperature.
There was high pressure: I had to move from England to Germany, so I had to let other people sort that. I’m still missing some things! My sole focus in those six weeks was to transform our new strategy into this product.
“With only six weeks it had to be a zero-mistake process. If you make one mistake it’s in the car. It’s crazy pressure: this was a starting point for Volkswagen. And now we’re going through the portfolio and connecting this to that.”
Mindt admits it’s “a bit strange” for a car maker to start a design reinvention with a small model, but he says the approach fits the ‘people’s car’ heritage that dates back to VW’s origins.
“The Beetle is a very optimistic, happy-looking, friendly car,” he adds.
“It’s not eating people, you know: other cars, they’re trying to eat everything, like eating the street or something. Volkswagen is not about that, it’s not all super-duper; it’s being the friendliest in the room.
“If you’re a volume maker you’re interested in not polarising, and most people want to look self-confident and happy. Not cute or comical, like a Mickey Mouse car, but optimistic and happy. This is what people want, not aggressive.”