First trip in an ID.4

This morning I drove into DC, and I can share some notes.

Starting point this morning was 83% charge on the battery, GOM showed 298 miles. Temperature was about 47 degrees, car was in the garage overnight. I didn't get around to preconditioning. I suspect if it were warmer that efficiency would improve a bit.

The GOM implies that a 100% charge would give you 350 miles. That seems ... optimistic. That being said, I would want to precondition the car to warm the battery if I wanted to maximize range.

I had the heat off, but the panoramic roof window let in a lot of light, and it warmed up nicely. Almost too warm, really. I ended up closing the shade later on.

The travel assist works quite well, but it disengage if you tap the brakes. The steering wheel has a capacitive sensor that knows when your hands are on the wheel - this works well, and I didn't get any bogus warnings about needing to hold the wheel. Just one or two fingers lightly resting on the wheel is enough to keep it happy.

The car has both a built-in navi as well as Android Auto. General concensus is that AA works better. Voice commands to the builtin navi were frustrating. There is an optional add-on to CarNet to add natural language handling - I haven't tried this yet.

Adaptive cruise control works well. There is a view on the dash that shows you the cars in adjacent lanes as well as cars ahead of you. It alerts you to cars in the blind spot - lights come on in the side view mirror. I believe that if you attempt a lane change while a car is in your blind spot thet you get a warning.

At the end of the trip, here is what I had. So I used 50% of the battery, and went 147 miles. At the end, the GOM had 110 miles left.

Incidentally, the same trip in the Kona also took 50% of the (smaller) battery.

 

The window shade was closed when I took these, so it is more to do with where I was parked, I guess.

I didn't notice the glare at the time, so I guess it is easy enough to see.

 

Thats the EPA range. Actual range will depend on a variety of factors (speed, temperature, whether you have the heat on, etc, etc).

Some cars underperform the EPA range. Some cars overperform (never seems to happen with ICE, but some EVs do).

 

In some ways I would have preferred an ID3 myself, but that wasn't an option. One of my complaints with the Kona was lack of cargo space in back, and that the back seats were uncomfortable for adults. Other than that, I was generally satisfied with the Kona, at least until the BMS fail. So I was looking for something somewhat a bit bigger to begin with. That being said the thing is a bit bigger than I envisioned when I first put in the reservation. When I have it in the garage next to my wife's Golf, then it stands out a bit more - partly because it is taller, perhaps a bit wider.

And as big as the thing is, I saw someone on Twitter complaining that it wasn't big enough (they wanted 3rd row of seats). That's the other thing about this that surprises me a bit - people have this list of things that the car must have or it is a deal breaker, and I just don't quite get it. If you want an EV, there just aren't that many things to choose from - I guess that was my deal breaker.

The place I notice the size is in narrower lanes (near construction zones, for example). Places where other people crowd over into your lane because they don't like to be up against the temporary concrete barriers. You really need to turn off some of the assist features in these situations - otherwise the car is fighting to center you in the lane when that's not quite where you want to be.

I have never been one to be fixated on 0-60 times. But for me, the acceleration is fine, and I have the thing in ECO mode. Some people have test driven Tesla, and they are then disappointed that the ID.4 doesn't perform the same way. I have heard comments that if you put the thing in a sport mode, that performance is better, and for people who fixate on this sort of thing, it seems to somewhat satisfy them.

Handling and control for me are fine - if you have driven other VW (or other European cars), you will likely be happy with the thing.

The pedestrian noise doesn't bug me - yeah I hear it, but it just isn't an issue. The noise in the Kona didn't bug me either, but I know that several people disconnected the thing because they didn't like the sound.