• 125kW charging means 200 miles of range in less than 30 minutes
• Choice of battery sizes to suit your lifestyle
• Can be very cheap to run if you charge at home

What are the running costs?

Like all electric cars, how much it costs to charge depends very much on how you charge it, and by extension your electricity tariff.

Public charging for electric cars can be expensive, especially if you want to use the fastest charging technology available, and you don’t have an up-front subscription. But if you can charge at home, running an ID.4 can be very cheap if you have an electricity tariff designed to support charging electric cars.

Two battery pack sizes are available to ID.4 buyers in the UK: 52kWh, or 77kWh (that’s kilowatt hour, the standard measure of electric vehicle battery capacity).

The 52kWh is, according to its WLTP ratings, capable of up to 233 miles per charge. The 77kWh will officially do up to 328 miles. In real world testing the figures aren’t quite so flattering. In summer we’ve found the 52kWh to offer more like 200 miles while the 77kWh won’t quite manage 300 miles; in winter, where all EV batteries perform less efficiently, you can probably expect to lose around 50 miles more.

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Access the public charging network, and you can add 200 miles to the range of the 77kWh model in 30 minutes, thanks to 125kWh DC fast charging speeds. Lesser ID.4s come with 110kW fast charging as standard, which should give these versions a 20-80% top-up in half an hour. It all sounds impressive, but a Kia EV6 can manage 10-80% in just 18 minutes with a fast enough charger.

If you use a domestic wallbox overnight you’ll probably be ready to go with a full battery by the morning – though for a full charge the 77kWh battery needs 12 hours 40 minutes. A three-pin plug, however, will take more than a day.

See our Volkswagen ID.4 specs page

Servicing and warranty

Servicing intervals are once a year or every 20,000 miles. It should be cheaper to service than a conventional car, as there are fewer moving parts and fluids to change.

The ID.4 gets the usual three-year/60,000-mile Volkswagen car warranty – though the EV battery components are covered for eight years or 100,000 miles (whichever comes first).

Reliability

• Too new for owners to report overall
• Lots of new tech, some of it very advanced
  

At this stage, it is far too soon to say whether the ID.4 is reliable or not, but we will monitor the situation and update this section when further information comes through. There are currently no official recalls registered on the government recall-check website.

Much of the technology is all-new to the Volkswagen Group, and has already had teething problems which led to the launch being delayed – especially around vehicle software. We’ve had reports of failures of software updates with other VW ID models, but nothing specific about the ID.4.

If you’ve got one, please consider leaving an ID.4 owner’s review to help others make a good buying decision.