EV startup Canoo launched their first subscription-only vehicle this week, presenting the world with an optimistic vision of an ecologically relevant, energy-efficient pay-by-the-month conveyance: the canoo. By Canoo.

As the U.S.-designed cars are to be built in China, the company is essentially collaborative, which makes the potential of the canoo—and the EV models that will surely follow it—globally and culturally significant. The design reflects this optimism, offering a bright, open, eminently functional interior that favors space and light over stylistic bombast. Even the name suggests the purely useful, and although the vehicle can be parked in a compact spot, it can comfortably accommodate seven passengers in its mobile living-room-like cabin.

The canoo is the brainchild of designer Richard Kim, who was behind the look of BMW’s i-Series, as well as the Faraday FF91. When dealing with a ideally functional vehicle like the canoo, Kim’s instincts put an ebullient spin on utility, one that appeals as youthful and unpretentious. The snub-nosed and palindromic canoo’s design lineage can be traced to the BMW i3, but also the VW bus, and even the Studebaker.

If the canoo most clearly evokes the VW bus, we shouldn’t be surprised. No other vehicle in the automotive history is as strongly associated with a period and a sense of generational solidarity as the Volkswagen all-purpose vehicle. Millennials may well identify the canoo in similar terms, given a decade. Its 250-mile range will make it ideal for the young professional of the next decade, and the subscription cost, the company asserts, will be very reasonable.

The vehicle is clearly designed to be an eco-warrior and a place of gathering and sharing as much as a means of getting from point A to point B, and urban fleets of the canoo are surely in the dreams of the company founders. And the canoo’s modular design (and so so-called ‘skateboard’ platform) makes customization easy, and is intended to make the company as versatile as possible.