Local arms of automakers are usually limited to marketing material from the parent company but sometimes they get really creative with their own publicity stunts. This is what happened in the case of Volkswagen Sweden which made a furry VW ID.4 GTX that resembles an oversized zero-emission cat.
The one-off was presented on the official Instagram account of Volkswagen Sverige (Sweden) during the holidays. The highlight is the fur that covers every inch of the bodywork, combined with whiskers at the front and a tail attached to the rear windshield wiper.
Read: Volkswagen Celebrates 500,000 Deliveries Of All-Electric ID. Models Around The World
If the costume wasn’t weird enough, Volkswagen washed their pet cat(r), recording the entire process in an Instagram video. A woman can be seen applying shampoo on the fur, washing it off with a hose, and using a hair dryer to dry it off before she combs it. As a finishing touch, she brushes the bumper intake that looks like teeth, combs the whiskers, gives the ID.4 GTX a nice massage, and adds hair clips on the furry mirror caps.
The company asked its nearly 40k followers for nickname suggestions so we guess they are planning to keep the cat-like ID.4 X in their inventory for a while. In another post, VW mentioned that a new law put into force in Sweden this year requires all indoor and outdoor cats to be registered with the Swedish Board of Agriculture, asking themselves if this applies to their EV.
The vehicle of choice wasn’t random, as the VW ID.4 was the best-selling EV in Sweden for 2022, and the fourth best-seller overall with 8,874 units, repeating the success of 2021. Volkswagen sold a total of 12,628 EVs in Sweden last year, translating to a 13.3% market share.
Notably, this is not the first time we see a vehicle wrapped in fur. Skoda made a similar April’s Fools joke with a furry Yeti back in 2014, Kim Kardashian replicated it in real life with her white Lamborghini Urus in 2021, while other vehicles have been spotted in the wild with a similar treatment. Maintaining the fur on a car sounds like a challenging task, especially when it is driven in rainy, snowy, or icy conditions, and requires regular washing.
