Everything we know about Volkswagen’s $40,000 ID.4 electric crossover
This is our first look at the 2021 VW ID.4, the brand's new battery-electric crossover. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]
On Wednesday, in an Internet livestream, Volkswagen unveiled the ID.4 crossover. Designed from the ground up as a battery-electric vehicle, it's part of a huge electrification plan that VW embarked on in the wake of dieselgate and the first of the new VW BEVs to reach these shores. More than that, it was designed with the US market firmly in mind. No edgy European hatchback or city car here-this is pure crossover.
I thought ID.4 was a Will Smith film?The ID.4 is one of a number of new BEVs that VW is building using a big box of interchangeable parts called MEB (Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten or Modular Electrification Toolkit). (Yes, that is a whole lot of acronyms.) We've seen MEB wrapped up in a number of different concept cars over the past few years and even drove one last year. But the first production model-the Europe-only ID.3 hatchback-started deliveries across the pond a few weeks ago, following some software- and COVID-19-related delays.
That car was deemed too much of a risk for the US market, which emphatically likes its VWs as crossovers these days. I got a chance to poke around a production prototype last week, and it's one of those rare cases where the transformation from concept to road-legal actually improved things. Size-wise, it's a little smaller than a VW Tiguan, at 180.5 inches (4,585mm) long, 72.9 inches (1,852mm) wide, and 64.4 inches (1,636mm) tall. There are some styling tricks in effect-the black panels along the sills and the trailing edges of the C pillars-but as with the Ford Mustang Mach-E, they're actually quite successful in detracting from some of the ID.4's visual bulk. For those keeping score, the drag coefficient is 0.28; no word on frontal area, though.
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