This Retro-Looking Chinese Van Is Pretty Much What I Wanted The ID.Buzz To Be

I think it’s no secret that my car tastes skew to the ridiculous, and for whatever reason and despite whatever else China may or may not be doing in the world, good or bad, they do seem to be more willing to really lean into appealing ridiculousness in cars than almost any other car-producing nation. Should Portugal or Kenya or Brazil or whomever decide to really step up their ridiculous auto industries, I’ll happily talk about their cars, but at this moment, China is delivering. And a great example of this is the Songsan Motors FullGood Summer, which is pretty damn close to what I wanted the Volkswagen ID.Buzz to be, at least in one very specific way.

That one very specific way is directly related to what I felt the Achilles’ heel of the ID.Buzz was when I reviewed it by taking it on a road trip: its range. Volkswagen managed to build what could be considered an absolutely fantastic road trip vehicle, only to have it hampered by a need to stop and recharge – for a not insignificant amount of time – every two hours or so. Even my meager bladder can hold out longer than that!

What I felt the ID.Buzz needed to be was a hybrid of some sort, ideally a plug-in hybrid. That way, it could operate as a clean, quiet EV for most of its time doing around-town and commuting driving duties, but could also take advantage of widely and wildly-available gasoline power when on a long roadtrip. The battery could be downsized, saving cost and weight, and I think a generally better and more flexible vehicle for everyone would be the result. All in a fun, retro-styled package!

Well, that seems to be exactly what the FullGood Summer is:

Songsan Motors FullGood Summer – new official pics

Songsan Motors is a small Chinese car maker based in Beijing. Its first car was a SS Dolphin, inspired by the C1 Corvette. The Summer is a new 8-door minivan. It is part of Songsan's new FullGood-series.

So the full name is:… pic.twitter.com/SSod7kL9vq

— Tycho de Feijter (@TychodeFeijter) May 12, 2025

We’ve written about these Songsan FullGood cars before, which were also over-the-top cartoony retro designs, American ones, but we also had a couple of pictures of the FullGood Summer in there, too. Remember this?

Our own contributor Tycho posted a tweet about this thing that caught my attention like a terrier catches a hot dog ejected from a condiment-lubricated bun and sent on an arching, dripping trajectory. The look of this thing is so over-the-top and bonkers that at first I thought these were AI images. And, actually, some of them definitely are, like this one:

That’s pure AI rubbish right there. But there are actual photographs of this thing out there, too, and they show something that looks pretty much just like the AI slop:

It lacks the restraint and refinement of a more mainstream retro design like VW’s ID.Buzz, but that’s also part of what I like about the Summer. It’s a good bit over-the-top, not just a retro design, but an unashamedly bonkers-ized retro design, retro seen through the filter of a couple of fat rails of nose candy and a childhood of summers spent working as a carny. It’s a little unhinged.

That’s probably why they decided to make this thing a six-door vehicle instead of putting sliding doors in the side like a rational carmaker might.

I have no idea why they opted for this strange six (eight if you count the two doors at the rear) setup, but it does at least appear to be quite flexible, interior-wise.

That said, Songsan (which doesn’t actually produce the vehicles themselves, but rather has other manufacturers build them under contract) does seem to have refined this sorta-VW Type 2 Microbus-inspired design a good bit since their earlier attempts, like the SS Summer, which  had an absurdly long nose that looked completely wrong on the VW Bus-style design:

Seriously, that looks more like a mutation than actual styling. Everything about that feels just wrong. The new, stubbier hood of the FullGood Summer (as opposed to the earlier SS Summer) and nearly one-box design works vastly better in this context. It’s still sort of cartoonish and overdone, but, again, that feels like a plus to me.

Besides, I kind of thing the bulging wheelarches and overall shape sort of reminds me of a Tempo Matador van more than a VW van, even, and that’s pretty fun:

I mean, where else are you going to see Tempo Matador visual cues in a new car from anywhere? I’d be really surprised if they actually looked at any Matadors, but still, I’ll take what I can get.

Spec-wise, the FullGood Summer – based on what is listed here on this site that seems to be selling them for the equivalent of $15,000-$20,000(!) if you’re willing to buy 1,000 of them – has one permanent magnet synchronous electric motor and one 1.5-liter gasoline engine, which seems to make about 154 horsepower (324 or so combined, it seems?), and is good for a top speed of over 100 mph.

The 15 kWh battery provides 60 miles of EV-only range, which seems reasonable, if not amazing, for most daily driving use. These are the sort of specs that I think would make the ID.Buzz a success, along with one other key spec: it’s said to sell for about $33,000. I did see another site that was stating the price at about $46,000, so I’m not really sure of what the actual price is, but whatever it is, it does seem to be a lot less than the ID.Buzz.

Whether it’s half or a quarter less than what an average ID.Buzz will go for, that’s a huge deal. This thing gives fun retro looks (if a little over-exuberant), plug-in hybrid flexibility, genuine road-trip-ready range and ease of refueling, lots of interior flexibility, all at a price a fraction that of the Buzz.

Of course, the chances of it coming here are about as likely as the chances that my next meal will be a manticore burger with blue cheese so there’s that. But it’s still fascinating to see what’s possible.

The current state of the Chinese car market feels like the American car market in the 1920s; so many companies springing up, so many odd ideas and experiments. Who knows how it’ll all settle in a decade or so, but this sure is a fun time to be watching it at this moment.