This is the Volkswagen e-BULLI, an official electric bus restomod

Everyone has different ways of coping with the coronavirus shut-in. People working from home are spicing up their teleconferences with animated backdrops. Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson has grown a beard. And I've been getting even more lazy about reading all the news alert emails that OEMs send me each day, which is why I've only just found out about a new electric Volkswagen bus that's going on sale in Europe. No, it's not the crowd-pleasing ID Buzz—it's called the e-BULLI, and it's an official electric restomod of a classic 1966 VW T1 Samba Bus, the product of a collaboration between VW's commercial vehicles division and a company called eClassics.

(For the uninitiated, a restomod is a "vehicle that has been put back together with the addition of new modern or aftermarket parts that were not on the vehicle when it came from the factory.")

Out goes the 43hp (32kW), 75lb-ft (102Nm) air-cooled flat-four engine, along with the transmission, fuel tank, exhaust, and so on. Instead, the rear wheels are driven by an 81hp (61kW), 156lb-ft (210Nm) electric motor borrowed from the e-up!, an adorable little electric city car that went on sale in Europe in late 2019. As there's more space in a T1 bus than an e-up!, e-BULLI gets the benefit of a slightly bigger lithium-ion battery, in this case one with 45kWh of useable energy, which is mounted amidships in the bus's floor.

The former engine bay at the back now serves as space for the power electronics and inverter, and the engine hatch lid is where you'll find a CCS charging socket. It can accept an AC feed of up to 22kW or a DC fast charge at 50kW, and VW says it has a range of "more than 124 miles" (200km). The Bus's suspension and chassis have been uprated to cope with more than twice the power and torque (and presumably some extra weight), so now there are multilink front and rear axles as well as coilover struts with adjustable dampers, all of which should mean a massive improvement in terms of ride quality and handling compared to a normal 1966 T1 bus.

VWBLEVEIEEOTUSWABOSCs apply below

The good news, at least if you're a VW bus-loving EV enthusiast in Europe with a bit of spare cash, is that the e-BULLI isn't a one-off. eClassics is going to sell conversions (including the suspension as well as the powertrain) for a little under $71,000 (€64,900). If you happen to be a VW-bus loving EV enthusiast in the United States with a similar amount of spare cash, don't fret—you could get something similar (although perhaps without the suspension) from Zelectric in San Diego. Although I still haven't been able to make the stars align to go out west to check out those aircooled-to-electric conversions myself, people whose opinions I trust speak very highly of them.

If you're a VW bus-loving EV enthusiast in either Europe or the US with a bit of spare cash (this should really be an abbreviation or acronym by now) and you want something a little more modern—like crash protection—then take heart because, to the best of our knowledge, the production version of the ID Buzz is still scheduled to go into production in 2022, probably in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It would be quite fitting for modern VW BEV buses to be built there; back in the late 1970s, the Electric Power Research Institute and the Tennessee Valley Authority built the Elektrobus, which was used in a two-year demonstration project in the city.

Listing image by Volkswagen

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