Design Your Own 3D-Printable Parts for the I.D. Buzz

Volkswagen, you may have heard, wants the the microbus to make a retro comeback and it’s soliciting its fans to come up with 3D printable accessories for it.

You can submit your ideas until September 14 and Volkswagen has a prize pool of 27,300 Euros for ($31,750) the best designs (the prize structure is unclear, but the figure leads us to believe that there are many prizes totalling 27,300 Euro, rather one top prize).

The idea seems to be to come up with interesting ways to utilize all that space that the MEB platform allows for. Volkswagen’s 3D printing develop does allow for all kinds of accessories, though.

So far, the submissions range from a stretchy plastic net that acts as ceiling storage, to nameplates that you can stick on the outside of the cars, to wheelchair ramps (an especially sensible idea given the Buzz’s spacial flexibility).

There are more interesting, silly, and fun ideas. If you end up submitting an idea, let us know about it (email sbell[at]verticalscope dot com) and we’ll wield our power to… feature it on the front page of the site. There doesn’t seem to be a public voting portion to this whole thing, so our power is enormously limited if there at all (which is a step up from our usual “non-existent” level of power).

Besides the neatness of the creating fun retro accessories, this is a bit of an insight into what VW is thinking when it comes to the future of accessories and the use of 3D printers. By reducing the need for mass production, accessories departments may become more important than ever. Like the original Mustang, whose popularity was based on each driver’s ability to get the one they wanted, accessories may allow VW buyers to make their cars increasingly, or even truly, unique.

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