The electric crossover segment is currently the hottest market in the automobile industry. Tesla Model Y is scaling new heights in terms of Tesla sales, and at the same time, there is no dearth of competitors either. Hyundai has launched the Ioniq 5, while Ford Mustang Mach E and Kia EV6 are on their way as well. Among all these, there is a chance you will miss the name of Volkswagen ID.4. And the major reason for that is the ID.4 is the least compelling of them. You can read it here in our comparison between four of these crossovers.
And now, joining the list of people who did not like the ID.4 is famous YouTuber and automobile engineer Sandy Munro. Sandy recently carried out a detailed analysis of the ID.4, spanning over a set of five videos. In one of these videos, he did a “ride and drive” to try and understand the overall driving experience.
Volkswagen ID.4 Ride and Drive
Sandy says he has a different view of the “ride and drive” experience. He says that he has a specific situation that he likes to simulate in this experience. Consider that you get off from a flight and you are in a hurry to get to your location. You hire a car from a rental service and get going. Now, a good “ride and drive” experience would be one where you don’t get frustrated as you drive this vehicle for the first time. It should be user-friendly and intuitive. It should give you exactly what you expect. And when it comes to the ID.4, Sandy did not get what he was expecting.
He started off on a drive to the Electrify America charging station in Novi, Michigan. Now, if you rented a vehicle and wanted to drive it to a certain location in a new city, you would want to turn on the navigation. That is the bare minimum you can expect from an electric vehicle, considering that electric mobility nowadays is riddled with technology. But Sandy was struggling with it. You can actually see in the video how hard it is to turn on the navigation. Sandy kept clicking on the location icon, but it kept showing the locations of nearby chargers. And that too without any map – it just said that the following chargers are nearby and showed the distance.
Sandy got incredibly frustrated and disappointed. He just quit trying and got going. Later, during the drive, he activated the voice commands and asked the system to open the maps, after which he finally got it.
The Driving Experience
About the driving experience, he said it was quite decent if you are a cab driver. It doesn’t go very fast, it has got comfortable seats and you can drive for hours together (of course, if the battery allows that). But if you wanted to buy an electric vehicle crossover for yourself, Sandy says he wouldn’t recommend this one. There are so many alternatives which are better in almost every aspect. And they cost just a fraction more.
Our Opinion
So there you go. In our comparison, the Volkswagen ID.4 ranked dead-last in almost all the categories. And now we know the infotainment system isn’t very user-friendly either. You would’ve expected better from an automobile giant like Volkswagen. Of course, the drive is decent and you cannot doubt the build quality of a company that tops worldwide automobile sales. But if a vehicle doesn’t excite you, and there are alternatives in the same price bracket, you’re not going to sell many cars.
