This is Nils.
Sorry ladies, he's not some buffed-up hunk of Scandinavian eye candy, Nils is Volkswagen's idea of a battery-powered, single-seat GT shopping trolley, and will be on show at the Frankfurt auto show later this month.
It may look a little silly (OK, very silly) but it boasts an aluminium space frame and gull-wing doors and, says VW, “has the dynamic performance of a sports car, yet travels silently, with zero emissions”.
It's designed to be both “technically realistic and economically supportable”, and even has the backing of the German government.
The Nils concept is a runner, with a range of 65km and a top speed of 130km/h, which should be fine for most EU commuters - according to the German bureau of statistics, three out of four people living between Berlin and Munich commute less than 25km to work.
The bureau also claims that more than half of those commuters travel by car - alone - so an electric single-seater is not as impractical as it sounds.
The concept is tiny, little more than three metres long (half a metre shorter than the new VW up! citycar), 390mm wide and only 1.2 metres tall, taking up about as much space on the road as a big scooter.
It has the same basic layout as a Formula 1 car, with the driver in the middle, the engine in the back and free-standing, 17” alloy rims shod with 115/80 (front) and 125/80 (rear) low rolling-resistance tyres.
The roof frame, door mounts, roll bar, and front and rear bulkheads are sheet aluminium; the sides sills, cross-members, and front and rear subframes are welded up from aluminium extrusions, and the bumpers and trim panels are plastic.
The whole thing weighs only 460kg so it's a lot of fun to drive, accelerating from 0-100 in less than 11 seconds and topping out at 130km/h, even though its electric motor has a nominal rating of only 15kW; peak power, says VW, is 25kW in short bursts and max torque 130Nm.
The concept has a relatively inexpensive, 5.3kWh lithium-ion battery that give it a range of 65km, driven gently, and can be fully charged in only two hours from a 220V, single-phase domestic socket.
The motor, battery, high-voltage pulse inverter and 12V DC converter are all contained in an aluminium housing between the rear wheels and VW says the whole drivetrain weighs only 19kg; we'll take that under advisement.
There's even a small boot above the engine compartment - big enough, says VW, for a crate of beers or a gym bag.
Suspension is by double wishbones all round and steering is purely mechanical (who needs power steering on a 460kg vehicle?), as is mirror adjustment although, in a concession to the German climate, the seat is electrically heated.
An electronic stability programme keeps the fun from getting (literally) out of hand, and an automatic distance control system radar-scans the space in front of the vehicle for about 200m and applies regenerative braking to prevent following distance dropping below a specified minimum value - it'll even stop from up to 18km/h if necessary.
The ignition/transmission control is a simple rotary switch with four positions: off, drive, neutral and reverse.
The instrument cluster is a 180mm TFT display with speed shown digitally in the middle and energy flow by a bar graph.
There's also a portable infotainment device like the one in the new up! clipped to the right-side A pillar that controls navigation, audio, telephony, trip data and range planning via a touchscreen.
It computes the expected driving range, then it not only displays the route on the map display, but also the radius that can be reached on the current battery charge.