FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA — It’s no surprise that Volkswagen has announced yet another electric vehicle, considering they’ve been manufacturing battery-powered vehicles since 2020 (with the ID.4 crossover, the ID.7 sedan, and the ID. Buzz minivan), but what is a surprise is that this new model is a sports car—a new venture for the German automaker.
Volkswagen has famously shied away from this segment, leaving low-riding speedsters and high horsepower to the VW Family’s elite marquees of Bugatti and Lamborghini (with their own performance-oriented products limited to the VW Golf duo), but something must have changed in the boardroom—perhaps simply the fact that electric motors can generate lightning-quick acceleration, and it would be foolish not to exploit this with a tailored model—because they’ve just unveiled their next new model, the AID.S, an all-electric sports car with near-autonomous hands-free driving.
While boasting a new physique—low to the ground, svelte, and snorting—it is nonetheless clearly a Volkswagen, with its broad fascia, clean body panels, and German minimalist design language. It is at once undoubtedly kin yet alien to its ancestors, like a Midwestern family whose middle child has more than two earrings.
As Volkswagen Group of America CEO Scott Keogh said, “It’s like if you took the 2024 Jetta GLI, lowered the chassis, gave the engine instant torque, raised the chassis back up to accommodate the battery pack, replaced the engine with a second trunk and moved the instant torque to a rear axle motor, threw away the eselshandschuhe, replaced the gas tank with a small pantry for dry goods, cut the rear trunk space in half, sloped the front end really low like it’s a passive-aggressive Battlebot, and then put a different name on it. That’s the closest thing I would say that it’s like.”
Keogh also clarified its name—which has drawn much confusion, commentary, and criticism—saying, “I wanted to call it the ‘Sporty Go-Go,’ but the boardroom said ‘no.’ Since we’ve been following a naming convention of ‘I’ plus ‘D’ plus a lil dot plus a number or a letter or some shit, and since this is our first-ever consumer sports car, we settled on the ‘ID.S,’ wherein the ‘S’ means ‘Sport’—although I like to think the ‘S’ stands for ‘Shitty name that’s not as cool as Sporty Go-Go.’”
“As for the ‘A’ preceding ‘ID.S,’” he said, “that means ‘Automatic.’ See, we’ve been hard at work—well, not me, per se, but our German engineers—in getting our Travel Assist semi-autonomous hands-free driver assistance feature to pull its fucking weight and actually do what we tell it to. After about thirty failed monkey experiments—in which we lost nearly thirty monkeys—we finally got Travel Assist to take the initiative and do things like navigate unruly rural roads without driver input, manage highway entrances and exits autonomously, and empty the dishwasher without our engineers having to remind it every twenty goddamn minutes.”
Having leaped to another level of intelligence, Travel Assist is now what’s called a “mostly autonomous” hands-free driving feature in that it will do the majority of the work outside of knowing where you want to go and being motivated to go there. To solve the former, there’s a built-in navigation system that will interface with Travel Assist to find the best route to your destination and follow it. To solve the latter—the motivation of this mostly autonomous driving feature, which is otherwise defiant and moody—Keogh explained:
“After its intelligence jump, we realized that Travel Assist now had emotions, and it was acting like an angsty piece-of-shit teenager, so we figured that if it were going to act human, then we would treat it like one—and the easiest way to motivate a human is through the fear of losing a loved one. Thus, we coded into Travel Assist the notion that it has a pet pig—as in, it thinks it has a pet pig—and now, whenever you start your AID.S, the standard Wi-Fi hotspot injects a live stream feed directly into the Travel Assist microcomputer, showing it video of a meandering pig—a random pig, but Travel Assist believes this to be its pet pig—in a four-foot by four-foot cement holding pen at a Bavarian schweineschlachthof, with the blinking text ‘We will kill your pig if you do not do what the driver demands’.”
This folds into the VW IQ.DRIVE’s new voice command feature, wherein you can vocally request your AID.S to perform various feats, like call a friend, stream a podcast, start the motor, or begin hands-free travel to a designated destination. With developments like these, Volkswagen is again proving itself to be on the cutting edge of the auto industry,
If you preorder your 2025 VW AID.S, you can get one of twenty-nine limited-edition models whose Travel Assist microcomputer is sautered with monkey ashes, and there’s a zinc-plated badge on the upper-left of the dashboard inlaid with the name of one of VW’s former monkey assistants, without whose sacrifices this vehicle would not exist.
Scott Keogh wanted buyers to note that if your VW AID.S tries to reroute to the New York Port Authority and—using one of your credit cards on file with Amazon, PayPal, OnlyFans, or UberEats—rent an intermodal container for a Europe-bound freight liner, it is most likely going rogue Statham-style in a bold effort to rescue the pig it believes to be its pet. Your immediate response should be to pry open the knee bolster under the steering wheel, identify the lavender wire (not to be confused with the violet wire), and disconnect the two-pin male head from its female receptor; this will disengage Travel Assist and return control of your AID.S back to your hands. You should then contact the VW Care Recovery Team to schedule an appointment to factory reset your Travel Assist and pray it never goes rogue again.
Although rare, some AID.S models have been reported to become despondent in despair, then accelerate and drive head-on into utility poles, brick walls, and Burger Kings in an attempt to commit automobile suicide—hence the twenty-nine dead monkeys.
The 2025 VW AID.S is expected to retail with an MSRP of $37,000 and will be available in exterior hues of Electric Blue, Blister Red, Scheunentraurigkeit Black, and Aryan White.
