Volkswagen (VWAPY) ID Buzz” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’The 2025 Volkswagen ID Buzz. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Sam Dobbins</span>’>
“This car is sick,” my son’s friend exclaimed when he saw the Volkswagen ID Buzz sitting in our driveway. Such is the nature of the contemporary car conversation that a 22-year-old man can see a jet-black, seven-passenger electric van and express the enthusiasm usually reserved for a Corvette or a Hellcat. But it’s also true that very few new vehicles deserve that level of excitement. The ID Buzz is one of them.
In an era where electric cars are either toxic political footballs or niche buys that face a troubled public charging infrastructure, the ID Buzz, long-anticipated and now arrived, has the opportunity to change the conversation. Not only is it cool to look at, like something a Sims-generated version of the Partridge Family would take on tour, but it’s also quietly efficient, extremely comfortable and fun to drive.
That said, I felt a little sick myself when they dropped off the ID Buzz I was to be testing for a week. One of the car’s best design features is its pastel color palette of gorgeous blues and teals and oranges, with a silver trim up top, echoing the classic VW bus design but with a sloping, aerodynamic hood. Mine was pitch-black all the way around, making it look like a slightly hipper version of an airport shuttle. And while the standard ID Buzz is definitely big—this is a van, after all—at more than 16 feet long and six and a half feet high, ours was massive. They come as five-seaters, but ours was a seven-seater, ridiculous because the only people who sat in it all week were me and my wife, plus our Boston Terrier, who is as big and as intelligent as a houseplant.
This created some problems, because though VW has equipped the ID Buzz with every possible safety technology imaginable, with radar, sonar, lidar and cameras everywhere (tremendous safety features even at the base price), it’s also so huge that it makes urban driving a challenge. So when I wanted to go to a movie theater with a tight-squeeze parking garage, I didn’t take the ID Buzz. I was driving by myself, and it was simply too big.
By the end of the week, I was feeling comfortable enough with the van to drive it to places with outdoor parking that I knew wouldn’t be too crowded. But I couldn’t imagine trying to squeeze it into a tight spot on a public street or at a busy grocery store during the day. That’s not why this car exists. It’s a modern family hauler, or the ultimate electric road-trip car.
The road trip is where the ID Buzz really buzzes. My wife and I and the dumb dog motored 60 miles to a nearby state park. It was smooth, quiet and relaxing; it was everything we could have dreamed that this car would be. That is, other than the color scheme, which kept it from really being the car of our dreams. But other than that, it was perfect. The cooled and heated seats were incredibly comfortable, the sound system was great, and the screen interface was more or less easy to navigate. The gear shift knob was a little counterintuitive, like driving on the left side of the road. But I got used to it.
The model we had, the “Pro S,” gets 282 horsepower out of an 86 kw/h battery pack. That’s not bad pickup for a van that weighs nearly 6,000 pounds. Its electric range is 234 miles. At 75 mph on the highway, VW estimates that it has a 180-mile range. That doesn’t seem like great range, and it’s not. But starting in June, VW electrics will be allowed to use the Tesla Supercharger network, assuming they can find stations.
VW is just now recovering from the diesel scandal of the last decade, and the ID Buzz is a sort of penance for the con it played on the public. The van is not perfect, but it’s also the most popularly-appealing electric vehicle since the Tesla Model S appeared in what feels like a political lifetime ago. The car I drove retails at $59,995, and it nudges up to more than $72,000 at the top trim level. If I could find a way to permanently park one, preferably one that was royal blue or purple, in my garage, that would be sick.
