Volkswagen ID.5 review

There’s no real sense of satisfaction to be had from driving the ID.5, other than the pleasure in eking out the range and getting good efficiency, if that sort of thing amuses you.

The Volkswagen Group has also now got good at putting together a decently thrifty electric powertrain and updates to the onboard electronics have released faster charging, which will be appreciated by those who regularly pound in the mega miles. The ID.5 is a decent motorway cruiser.

And if we're not long-distance fanatics? 

The steering is weighty but dependable, and the standard model avoids the sort of torquey point-and-squirt behaviour that many electric cars these days mistake for character. It makes the car easy to drive in traffic or around town, and the chunky accelerator and brake pedals are a plus.

It is rather stiffly sprung though, meaning it’s not the most comfortable family SUV despite there being plenty of tyre sidewall on top of the smallest 19-inch wheels. We found similar with the ID.4, though, so it’s not just a coupe problem. 

Is the GTX version as sporty as it sounds? 

Volkswagen seems to have glued this badge on for want of anything else in the company storage cupboard. It’s a brisk machine, but there’s no enjoyment in driving an ID.5 GTX quickly. The four-wheel-drive set-up just about avoids any scrabbling indignity and it’ll get cross-country efficiently enough. It’s certainly not the sort of performance car that you’d want to take the scenic route.

Across all the ID.5 models there’s a nannying quality to the car where it’s constantly deciding that it knows how to do things better than the driver. This manifests in features as insignificant as the car turning itself off when you get off the driver’s seat, or as niggling on the move as not being able to adjust the regeneration save for a simple on-or-off brake mode.

Is that really a big problem?

To be fair, the predictive regen in the ID.5 is quite good in practice: the car monitors the road and will slow you down if you’re off the accelerator and cars ahead are slowing down. Ultimately the ID.5 feels like driving in a computer game with all of the computer aids turned on (and you even get green lines to follow from the augmented reality head-up display that’s standard on higher trims).

You say it's efficient. What does that mean in the real world?

We drove an ID.5 Match over 700 miles, many of them on the motorway and many more in the pouring rain. The car averaged 4.0mi/kWh over that time, which works out as 309 miles of range against the WLTP figure of 339 miles. Expect less in the winter, but that's impressive.