In January my new company car finally arrived and this time our choice fell on the VW ID.Buzz, coming from the now discontinued Sharan.
It is the newer model with the ID.7s engine, we also went for the long wheel base and seven seater configuration, which comes with the bigger 85 kWh battery.
The Tl;Dr is this, it’s a great car and I truly love it, I think VW has its mojo back. But there are little annoyances.
If you want to know a little more about it, stick around.
The body and interior
The Buzz is already not the smallest car ever made, but the long wheel base really stretches it out. At 4.9m long, 2.2m wide and 1.95m tall it really is a beast and not the best car to park in cities. Garages can get a little tight as well, particularly the spiral ramps usually built for much smaller cars, but with a little careful driving one can manage well enough. However, it doesn’t look as big as it is and neither does it feel big.
One warning here, the tail gate opens to a position above the roof, so be careful in lower garages. See picture below.
As far as the interior goes, the two seats in the back can be removed which gives you plenty of space to load luggage. When I first got the car I removed the rear seating row to have the bigger trunk, but I soon reinstalled them and drive with the seats folded down. This gives you a smaller compartment behind the seats to store things and if needed you can place stuff on the folded down seats.
If the rear seats are up, there is however very little luggage space left, so a family holiday for seven over a week might be pushing it (a lot).
I would also recommend getting some storage boxes, given that there are almost no factory ways to secure luggage in the trunk except for two little plastic things to velcro into the carpet. I got some foldable ones with velcro on the bottom that work rather well.
The middle seat row can’t be removed, but be folded down. If both back rows are folded down, they are on the same level, but you get a little space between them so not connected flat surface.
The front row is just two seats and a removable console in between, the right seat can’t be removed or folded down.
All in all you can sit comfortably in any seat, there are USB-C plugs everywhere for charging phones and such, the middle row can be moved back and forth for more comfort.
On the down side, VW followed the current trend of installing touchscreens and monitors instead of proper buttons to control your cars function. But at least lights, windscreen wipers, cruse control, volume and the temperature of the AC have dedicated buttons and/our touch surfaces so you don’t have to navigate menus to perform tasks while driving.
Sadly also the tachometer is handled via a screen so you only get a digital one, which sucks.
As far as the satnav goes, we opted not to buy VWs version (btw the hardware is already in the car and should one choose to want it afterwards it’s “just” a 1000€ software unlock) but go with CarPlay/Android Auto. Up until now, I have not missed a single thing and can only recommend saving the money.
One thing they will tell you is, that using the VW-SatNav the battery will be optimized for charging when you navigate to a charger. However this can be triggered manually, so no real advantage there.
Driving and range
Let’s start with driving first. This car is smooth and I mean it, you can cruise 130km/h on the motorway and feel like sitting on your couch in the living room, it is well isolated and there is little noise from the outside. The 280 something horsepower accelerate it in a stately manner, but at 2.5 tonnes it also needs a little more power. Steering is easy and the suspension is soft. If I had to compare it, I’d say it feels like a bigger S-Class Mercedes or a Lexus LS, certainly not like a bus. It is more like gliding along than driving.
If you are a fan of a stiff suspension and high cornering speeds, not you car, but given it’s shape, you probably won’t be looking at it anyway, if you like that other kind of car.
Since we are at the topic of cornering and steering. The lot of the weight is placed beneath the seats in form of the battery pack, so the car has a low center of gravity, it also is rear wheel drive and the front wheels move wide so the turning circle of this thing is way narrower than one would expect. From my personal experience it is tighter than my 4 series BMW. Thanks to the low center of gravity it also is pretty quick around corners without feeling like it’s tipping over.
As far as the ride comfort and driving experience goes, there are zero complaints.
Let’s talk range. I can already hear the EV fanatics screaming, range doesn’t matter, but yeah, it does.
When I first got the car, in a mild winter and on winter tires, doing normal motorway speeds between 120 and 130 km/h with the heating on, it would get me around 280 to 300 km of range.
Considering the weight and aerodynamics of this moving brick wall, that is rather good, now that it’s a little warmer I get it up to around 400km of range and frankly speaking, that is more than enough for me.
Recharging is pretty ok, the car can take up to 185 kW according to VW, but as their values usually go, you might experience something else out in the wild. For me it charges at around 160kW and I haven’t spent much more than 15 to 20 Minutes at a fast charger yet. Or in terms of someone in sales, jump out, plug in, start a call and the struggle to get rid of the customer in time, so the electrons won’t start flowing out of the tank 😉
Driving assistants and general UI
Here we start hitting the (small) dark side of the car, let’s start with the little helpers.
As required per EU law it comes equipped with a lane assistant, emergency breaking assistant, “intelligent” speed limit assistant and some others I can’t recall. But not a bild spot assistant, which would make a lot more sense than all of the above.
Now, the speed limit assistant is basically hit or miss and more miss than hit. Recently it told me the speed limit was 100km/h in a 30km/h zone. It doesn’t detect if you leave one road where a speed limit is established and tries to enforce it on the next one where a different limit is to be observed.
If this was working, I’d actually find it useful, but as it is now, I get in the car and disable it right away, because it’s more misleading than anything else. It still displays what it thinks the speed limit is, but I won’t start beeping if it is wrong.
The lane assistant seems to be a bit suizidal, if you try to avoid an obstacle within your lane, without leaving it, but leaving the centre of the lane (aka not using the indicators), it tries steering the car into the obstacle. All in all, it seems to prefer to drive in the centre of the lane, which is odd. At least in Austrian driving schools you learn to drive more to the right of the lane on country roads, because it leaves more space in the middle of the road for cars overtaking other cars to tractors. This assistant won’t let you do that. So I disable that one as well.
Emergency braking has not fucked up yet, so I keep it on, seems to work and makes a lot of sense.
And then there is the big omission of VW. This is an EV, it has two driving modes, Drive and Break (aka full recuperation), it even features an Auto-Hold if you stoped the car. But it doesn’t go to a full stop if you let go of the accelerator. Why??? One-Pedal-Driving would be so neat in cities and traffic jams. Please VW this can be done via a software update, add it, now….
Btw, if you are wondering, why one would want anything but full recuperation. The answer is wet or icy roady where you wouldn’t want the car to start breaking immediately after lifting the foot off the accelerator while struggling to regain control while it’s adrift.
Anyway, let’s head to the next big mess, the UI.
One thing that is very annoying is, that sometimes your phone takes a little longer to connect, so you first head to the assistant menu to disable everything that doesn’t work, but then your car and phone find each other and while your finger moves down to the screen the interface changes and you hit something else. If I interact with the screen and choose a menu, the car shouldn’t automatically switch to a different menu, this is a bad UI design.
The next thing is, if you are in reverse and on the break, the car won’t let you switch to a different menu, say CarPlay to set the satnav, while your garage door is closing, you have to switch to neutral. Why????
Once you are in the parking “gear” you can’t access that car shortcuts to say change the level you want the battery to be charged to, now you have to go to the full menu.
If you try to find something on the main screen too long while driving, the car locks you out. Now that is generally good, although a bit of a homemade problem given a dedicated button would work better than a stupid touch screen. But. It doesn’t just lock you out. It presents you with a 1000 word essay (slight exaggeration) about how bad an idea it is to spend so much time on the screen while driving. Which you are going to read and not look at the road. It is things like these, that make me want to punch the main screen while driving.
The main touch screen is not angled towards the driver, so accessing stuff to the right makes me strech over, which is not ideal.
This one I think is not on VW but on Apple, if you are navigating via CarPlay and using Google Maps instead of Apple Maps, the smaller display in front of you won’t show you the next turn so you always have to look down to the main screen.
This car is huge, but VW could not find a space to fit a spare tire. (Really??? How about the front like the original????????)
To even it out, here are a couple of well thought out things VW has built into the bus.
The charing port is on the right and if you open the right side door it slides over the charging port. If you are plugged in or the charging port is open, that door won’t open for you, so you can’t damage the charger.
The car will warn you if you try to drive off with the charging port connected or open.
By now VWs automatic lights switch on in rainfall so you won’t be one of these invisible cars.
The UI gives you little messages once you hit certain ranges, which is kind of cute. See below
And then, there is the reception of this car.
I have driven nice cars in the past, but only one time someone started talking to me upon realizing that car was one mine. That has been with my BMW and the other person told me my red leather seats were ugly.
With this one:
Family father in parking lot: Oh it this the new ID.Buzz, that’s such a cool car, can I take a look in the trunk? I am also considering it.
Cleaning lady of a customer of my company: Are you the fellow with the cute bus? Can I look on the inside? Can the drive a little? (It ended at driving a little, really)
Random bloke a charging station: Hey, nice bus, I am considering it, my Tesla soon is out of it’s lease and that one is really cool, can you recommend it?
It is so odd, but people seem to love it and it is a conversation starter, but I understand them. Up until now, EVs were either high class sporty cars or shittly small cars with no range. This is a car for the people.
This is a true Volkswagen 🙂