VW ID.4 Two-Year Review (So Bad I Returned It)

what is it like owning a Volkswagen id4 no one and I mean no one better to tell you than one of the first id4 owners in the US and one of the few who owned one for over two years and that's me I will tell you what happened from the moment I laid my eyes on and fell in love with one to just a few days ago when I returned it a year early to e-local Volkswagen dealership so you know you're in for a good story and it is now originally I was a Tesla owner back in 2012 over a decade ago way before it was cool and I bought two more after that but after a few years I started to get really sour on Tesla because of many persisting issues and most importantly really poor customer service so I started to look for a new electric vehicle when I saw the Volkswagen id4 and you are literally looking at the footage when I saw the id4 for the first time it was uh the midi event I just fell in love with it right away now at that time Volkswagen wasn't really promoting this to the media or to the public until the very unveiling and what I really liked was that the CEO of Volkswagen group of America Scott Keo was very confident in the car without being too cocky and also without being afraid that oh my God Elon Musk is gonna tweet at me and it's gonna be scary and you know he was very confident that this is a great EV for the masses but there were so many things I really liked about the car first of all even though it's an SUV and I'm not that crazy about SUVs I loved the look the front and the back and the side was great the range was great 250 miles the price was amazing after the incentives it was about 35 000 and my payments were under 400 a month for my lease it was a very smooth and comfortable ride it came with three years of unlimited charging and Electrify America it had seed massagers and not just the driver but also the passenger and I didn't know that until I had a date and riding with me and she was like oh my God this massage was great and I was like what was that you don't get it oh my God you get a massage and uh that's how I discovered it was dual massager the ID light was a great feature that I really fell in love with it was compatible with Android auto and apple play it had an amazing still does has an amazing turn radius and literally looks like a car chasing its own tail so that's great in tight spots uh very simple and great user interface including the gesture controls basically as far as EVS were concerned it was the best bang for your buck and also you didn't really have to learn how to use a car again now it wasn't perfect it it wasn't very fast 0 to 60 was not impressive at all however I was not and still am not really into beating Ferraris and Bugattis off of the light I gladly took the quiet and smooth ride I've also discovered that the ID light feature really wasn't compatible with the Android auto so I ended up not getting any use out of it the windows controls oh man yeah somebody just up there I have to say it's it's it's it's awful they could have just spared the extra two and a half dollars to put all four just like everybody else and almost immediately I found out that voice commands really really really sucked and almost immediately Volkswagen has announced that they would be building a factory in Chattanooga Tennessee which I later visited and the price of the car would go down even more also shortly after I got my first edition Volkswagen has started sponsoring this channel as you guys know when I'm promoting something on my channel I prefer to be a customer so that was a perfect fit now about a week in when I was giving a ride to one of my influencer friends Eli Burton who was a huge Tesla fan running the my Tesla Adventure Channel you know I was showing him around and literally right in the middle of him driving in the middle of the street the car stalled and completely died I'm not gonna lie that was embarrassing I was showing him how happy I was to get away from Tesla and that happened I took it to the dealership and they said listen these are brand new so it's gonna be a few weeks until we get the part and I was like oh great this is the problem that I was trying to get away from Tesla oh my God so many Deja vous but I find out later and this is the perks of being an influencer Scott Keon finds out about this internally and literally the next day I get a phone call from the dealership Mr guberman your id4 is ready to go we we found the part but after that honestly it's been a pretty smooth sailing for a while I was really enjoying the car but with time the issues that I was kind of brushing off at first as a first adopter were starting to get annoying or grew bigger some other issues started to come up and Volkswagen didn't really seem to be doing anything about it Volkswagen has promised the over-the-air update to fix a lot of these issues but the one really actually doing them so with time when we realized one wasn't really coming a lot of us and wasn't just me a lot of id4 owners started to get really annoyed and realized that it wasn't as enjoyable to drive the car and in many cases kind of unsafe and the reason I know that there were a lot of other id4 owners having the same issues as I was was because that one of many Facebook EV owner groups that I own I are four id4 owners and at this point it has almost what 15 000 members so let me list all of the issues I was having and many other owners were having with the id4 that you definitely want to know about but before that a quick reminder that this video is brought to you by electron look one of the biggest challenges with owning an EV is finding convenient and reliable ways of charging it and it's no secret that most EV drivers like to charge at home that's why electron built the powerful v-box in-home charging station it provides up to 48 amps of power for your j1772 EV it adds up to 46 miles of range per hour and fully charges your AV in under 6 hours simply plug in your car at night and wake up to a full charge in the morning get one today using the discount code in the description of this video so are the biggest problems that I and many other id4 owners had with the car which essentially drove me away from the brand first of all let's start with the Android auto it takes forever to connect sometimes I can be a mile away from my house by the time it actually connects but if I do need to use the navigation system I kinda have to sit in my garage and wait for it to connect but sometimes it doesn't and then you have to restart the actual car the phone uh try to do a little dance it is so annoying it can take up to five or ten minutes and many times I just have to repair my phone over again also in the middle of me driving it takes away the Audio I could be listening to a WhatsApp message or to a podcast and it would just stop in the weird fix for it is to go to the YouTube app play a random video and somehow it brings the sound back and then you go back to that app again ah and sometimes the screen just gives up goes blank good night now at some point I reached out to Volkswagen and to their credit at that time they did fly a couple of German software Engineers because that's where Engineers come from uh and basically once I showed them all of this they uh blamed all of this on Google and I said no no no listen I've used three different phones and I've used them also in many other cars because I test drive a lot of other cars and I also have friends believe it or not and it only doesn't work here um they said yeah yeah we're gonna fix it you know with the over the year update and as soon as I said uh but when they just disappeared I've also noticed with time that my phone would overheat but then I got a new phone and it would also overheat to the point that it would just stop working and you would have to like literally jam it into the air conditioning vent you could literally fry an egg on it so suck it Caribbean owners I got my portable kitchen for free and by the way all these problems are not happening once in a while they're happening like on daily basis once in a while something like a backup camera would go blank uh let's let's talk about the tire pressure monitor this is the dumbest thing in the car so the way it works is that if tire pressure is off in any way shape or form it says that the tire pressure is low even if the tire pressure is too high the only message it can give you is it's too low so you start pumping the air into the tires and you go overboard and it will say oh it's too low it's too low when it's actually too high which this is insane I don't even know why it's legal now let's talk about the mobile app honestly a drunk five-year-old can design a better mobile app first of all it actually doesn't have that many features at all uh you have to log into that app twice once into the app and second time into your only car and then sometimes when you try to change one of the very few features you're trying to change your temperature and a lot of times it will just time out a lot of times by the time I would get to my car the the temperature would still be the same and the app would fail to contact the car in the first place and they have updated that app twice now and yet no improvements whatsoever now lastly what started to happen was when I would charge with Electrify America which I did a lot in the last six months because I became a digital Nomad and was traveling through the country a lot of times it would not connect to the actual Electrify America charger and I know it was not the charger because before that or after that I saw people charging just fine with other EVS so this is in id4 problem which again probably software so no surprise now mind you for a while Volkswagen of PR department was still communicating with me and responding to some of my inquiries but then they stopped and they actually flat out told me that they have essentially Banned Me from their media events and that's because I did this it kind of looks like a Ford delivery van dressed up as a Volkswagen minibus for Halloween you weren't supposed to drag the ID buzz into the past you were supposed to bring the past into the future this is not how you compete with Tesla and other impressive competitors and they wanted this this is the new ID buzz and it's the Cure My Friends the cure for the oversized yet somehow cramped boring samey annoying SUV that had been clogging up our streets for too damn long oh man they are so good at this how do they do that [Music] oh oh oh now meanwhile at that time at the end of the last year I realized that you know what I I I think I just wanna return this car back to the dealership and my lease early but I've also realized that I might be moving overseas I wasn't sure at that time now I am and I didn't want to start another three-year lease so I've decided I'm just going to leave California and drive through the country and see if I find a better home so guess which car I had to use and I wasn't complaining because I was getting free unlimited uh fast charging from Electrify America but very quickly I found out that was a rough go when I checked out of my Oklahoma City Airbnb heading to Austin Texas my car died 100 completely died it gave me a few 12 volt battery warnings and then had to be towed to the dealership now they said don't worry and you know kudos to them they got me back on the road and I made it all the way to Austin that same day but apparently it was the different part of the software the one that runs the 12 volt battery now I didn't stay in Austin for too long because I realized I was as allergic to it as I was to California essentially it's kind of like people picked up the worst things about California then took out all of the electric cars for some reason and it just dumped it in the middle of another state so then when I got to Houston Texas which I actually really liked and stayed there for many many months after that my car died again with the same error messages but this time the dealership said it's gonna be a few days and this was Christmas they also had no loners and had no agreements with the local car car rental services so I was really stuck without a car throughout the whole Christmas break however they did fix it and they fixed it by replacing the 12 volt battery and doing the over-the-air update that's been promised for a long time except for it was not over the air at all and it took like three days now I do have to say that the difference between your Volkswagen EV breaking down and your Tesla breaking down Volkswagen has like way way more service centers so that at least wasn't the problem the car was operational again and I was excited to see if all of my other problems were finally gone and they weren't not not a single one actually everything that I've just listed to you guys still there as a matter of fact they've added a couple first of all the audio disconnects way more the Android auto disconnects way more and now they've added this useless screen that comes on every time you turn the car on to log in to your only account and that damn thing freezes once in a while also so you have to restart the entire UI but I am finally moving out of the United States so this was my last day with the car and I have to say I am not going to miss it to be fear as I've been talking to some of the more recent id4 owners 2023 2022 models and they told me that a lot of these problems actually don't exist in their cars so it looks like Volkswagen is improving the software but just not for people who bought it a couple of years ago and that's a shame and I get it I get it I was the first adopter for Tesla I was the first adapter for the id4 and I was prepared to to deal with a lot of these issues uh however I wish the customer service and general support from both Brands would have been better and I think it was a lost opportunity for them because they could have still had a fan in me and many other people like me instead of essentially a hater since then the Volkswagen group kicked out their big CEO Herbert Dees he was big in terms of electrifying the Volkswagen group unfortunately he was replaced with the Porsche CEO and as you guys know I think you know the Porsche icon the only EV from Porsche so far is a bit of an embarrassment to electric vehicles despite some really good specs we'll see what happens with them as of for me I am going to be in Thailand and it will be kind of fun to see the EV Revolution to take off because they're just coming around to that there will be a whole different set of EVS for me to check out and they really need it the pollution is really bad especially where I'm moving to which is downtown Bangkok so that will definitely be fun and by the way there are plenty of alternatives to the Volkswagen id4 and essentially Tesla Model y over 30 coming on the market just this year and I made a video with all of them you can check it out right here let me know your thoughts let me know which electric car you're shopping for and which one is your front runner other than that see you guys next time and remember to stay charged

Channel: E for Electric

Views: 587,225

Keywords: vw id.4, id.4, volkswagen id.4, vw id.4 review, vw id.4 2023, vw id.4 tips, id.4 2 year review, electric vw, e for electric

Id: 3hYLSyRvSY0

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2023