Volkswagen ID.3 - long-term review

This is a goodbye report, marking the departure of an ID.3. But it isn't goodbye, because an ID.3 is still here. Just a different one. The replacement is metallic red instead of metallic ditchwater, but we're colourblind and there's more to it than that. It has the 77kWh battery pack instead of 58kWh. Since its energy consumption is likely to be the same (we'll see) I'd expect my real range (with safety margin) to go from 200 miles to 200x77/58=265 miles. That'll be useful as one journey I often do is 250 so I'll avoid a charge stop.

But today's job is to tell you about the car that's leaving. First a confession to TopGear.com commenter Sunny Worthing, who asked about the stereo. I replied it was OK. I must have been listening to too many podcasts. Listening to music, it's some way below the standard you'd hope for. There are no rear speakers for a start. Bass is weak. Treble is OK, not too distorted anyway, but there's no sense of stereo placement. Basically music sounds dead. And by the way, even the 77kWh one, which has posh equipment including an AR HUD and electric seats, still lacks rear speakers.

So there's a discovery, late in the day, that disappointed me. Here's one that pleased me. The boot has a false floor, as is common these days, so you can set it at tailgate lip height and have a compartment below for cables and stuff you want to hide. Or you can lower it to get a boxier boot. I knew that. But I just realised that below the false floor is another false floor, with a compartment big enough for the charge cable, tyre kit, and first-aid kit. Handy. I realised that because I was going away with several people and mucho baggage. It all fitted.

I checked, and the 77kWh battery version has the same compartment, so you lose no packaging for the extra energy capacity. Mind you, to loop back to Sunny Worthing's point, I wouldn't have objected if it held a subwoofer.

In other luggage capacity news… I cycled half-way across France a few weeks ago. You can't take bikes on Eurostar, so I carried it in the car to Dover, then went as a foot passenger on the ferry. The ID.3's boot is short, so with the back seats folded you still have to ram the passenger seat way forward to get the bike in and shut the tailgate.

Finally, a photo for you of the ID.3 on the Torpoint ferry. The trip to Cornwall showed up again how peaceful this car is. The day after that, I took another train to Crewe to drive a Bentley Bentayga. Whatever the Bentley's other attributes, I was ceaselessly annoyed by its jarring secondary ride – the high-frequency harshness you get on coarse tarmac and sharp-edged potholes.

Bentley should put in a call to their colleagues at Wolfsburg because the ID.3 is much better at this. Mind you, so's the Flying Spur four-door that they gave me a lift back to the station in.