Funky-Looking Volkswagen Beetle Electric Concept Spotted in Paris

A funky-looking Volkswagen Beetle has been spotted recently in Paris, France. Taking a close inspection of this Beetle via a YouTube video posted by Paris Videostar, we can see that this is a VW Beetle Electric Concept created for the animation movie “Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir”.

VW Beetle Electric Concept spotted in Paris (left) & its digital world counterpart in the “Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir” animated film.

This Beetle Electric Concept was spotted parking at the side of the street, just next to a venue that appears to be hosting an event related to said animated film. This life-sized Beetle Concept looks exactly the same as we’ve seen on the movie poster, featuring the signature rounded Beetle silhouette plus some ladybug-inspired and cartoonish design elements that matches the movie’s main protagonist.

In spite of its exterior almost mirroring the animated version, we can’t have a look at the car’s innards as the large greenhouse and glass doors are draped in grey hue – which also hinted that this is a mere static model with no mechanical bits. Apart from that, both the car’s front and rear lighting units are apparently non-functional, only for styling purposes.

Although we’ve seen some life–sized models of animated movie cars being exhibited as part of the movie’s promotional drive, the presence of this Beetle out of nowhere in the streets of Paris does raise some questions and blow up some rumours.

This Beetle Electric Concept does have somewhat similar footprint to the last Beetle model

The Beetle Electric Concept footprint here somewhat resembles the last production Beetle model, which was discontinued back in 2019. We quote back the words of former VW CEO Herbert Diess during the ID.Buzz launch event last year, in which he said that “many other emotional cars are possible on our scalable MEB platform”.

VW's proprietary MEB EV platform (left) used on the new VW ID.2all concept EV (right)

As for now, it remains unknown what the former boss meant by ‘emotional cars’, but we are certainly aware of the modularity of VW’s MEB platform. To date, the most compact VW concept model to underpin the MEB platform is the VW ID.2all concept EV, which is said will be the base of next-gen VW Golf EV.

Then again, only time will tell whether this Beetle Electric Concept will make its way to VW’s production line in years to come, or perhaps this is just a promotional stunt by Volkswagen to promote its EV models to the younger demographic.