The Volkswagen ID.Buzz I Wanted Was Doomed From The Start

I think it’s fair to say that a re-born Volkswagen Microbus is one of those cars that I have personally been hoping to see happen for a very long time. And, I’m hardly alone there: even Volkswagen itself has been dreaming of a re-born Bus since 2001, when their first of five resurrected and modernized Microbus concepts hit the scene, and it’s been continuing on slowly, so very slowly from there. Finally, over 20 years later, we finally have a re-born Microbus, and I think this is the third or maybe fourth event I’ve been on for the ID.Buzz? I’ve rarely seen a car have such a long and public gestation. But we’re finally here, and this is an important vehicle, and I have many, many thoughts about it. Including thoughts about why I know the Bus I dreamed of could never have happened, at least not like this.

The original Microbus is one of those iconic cars that was born from entirely practical considerations, and all of the character and personality and soul that it developed over the years was an unintended side effect of just being such a useful, unpretentious machine. It was a box on wheels, originally designed from a quick sketch intended to solve a specific problem, how to make a cheap and useful commercial vehicle, and from there it was gradually realized that it was also great at hauling people, too, and this box on wheels was really a sort of mobile room, and as such, just about anything – and I do mean anything– could and definitely was done inside the metal walls of a Microbus.

With all that in mind, let’s take a moment to remember that all of this – from the commercial vehicle that got Europe back on its feet after WWII to hippie-bus to family hauler to small camper to this new advanced EV ID.Buzz all starts here, with this crude sketch:

The original bus grew from that sketch and became the icon we all know by simply being out there in the world, doing things. It earned its personality slowly and laboriously over the decades. The ID.Buzz is different; the Buzz takes an already-formed personality and puts it on, like a suit.

It’s a nice suit, sure, but it’s still just a suit. The motivations and reasons that the Buzz exists are not the same reasons why the original Type 2 Bus came into existence in the first place. The Buzz is here to be VW’s new halo car, it’s here to remind the world of the intense and unmistakable personality and character that Volkswagen used to possess, after so many years of VW diluting that character with so many near-indistinguishable SUVs and crossovers. It’s a reminder to the world that VW can still be VW.

Why Being An EV Restricts A New Bus In Ways That Aren’t Just Distance

The original Bus is a concentrated bomb of emotion and nostalgia and character. There’s so much there to work with! This new iteration of the bus does manage to capture a lot of that in its styling, and, don’t get me wrong, it works, and people absolutely notice. People were turning heads and pointing and yelling things and asking questions everywhere these big loaves rolled past. They’re fun, and they make people around you smile, and that’s a very important trait in a car, I think.

This doesn’t change the fact that it isn’t the re-born Bus I want it to be, for a number of reasons, all of which hinge on one of the most crucial parts of what this new Bus is all about: it’s electric.

And by electric, I mean all electric, a battery electric vehicle, and on one hand, that’s great: it’s incredibly efficient, quiet, and fast, with great acceleration – things that nobody was ever really crowing about for the original air-cooled combustion-engined Bus. Well, they were decently efficient, I suppose, just, you know, loud and slow.

 

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Even though all of the four earliest reborn-Microbus concept cars that VW showed weren’t intended to be electric vehicles, the one that VW eventually brought to market really had to be. VW had no choice, really, because of a little very big something called Dieselgate. After that disaster, VW’s next big moves had to be ones that avoided the whole idea of emissions altogether. This isn’t just me speculating wildly; remember this ad from about five years ago when the ID.Buzz was first teased?

VW’s ads have always been great, and this one is no exception. It’s a powerful tale of remorse and redemption and rebirth, told through imagery and music and almost no actual words. And it only works if the vehicle in question is electric.

So, the re-born Bus had to be electric, had to be part of the ID family of cars built on VW’s MEB platform, and that also means had to have a big-ass battery pack so it could have some decent amount of range. That also means that it has to be at least somewhat expensive because a battery pack of that size is just not cheap.

You can’t build an EV with a 91 kWh battery pack on the cheap. And once you know that, it forces your hand. The idea that VW could have built a nice, affordable new Bus that fit the original Bus’ do-anything-for-anybody mandate just can’t happen when you have a platform this expensive to produce. So VW did the only thing they really could do in this situation: they kicked the Bus upmarket.

As a result, the ID.Buzz is a premium-feeling nostalgia machine, something that will initially appeal to wealthy boomers who have many fond and debauched memories of their youth spent in VW Microbuses, roadtripping and other kinds of tripping, back when they were young and taut and sexy and life was an idealistic rainbow blur of possibilities and righteous indignation and music and drugs and sex and no responsibilities.

Now they’re wealthy and comfortable (well, some of them) and those of them that haven’t been responsible for driving up the prices of original VW Microbuses to unattainable levels for all us poor schmucks can now get a taste of their old proto-vanlife with a brand-new Bus that doesn’t ask them to give up any comfort or convenience.

The ID.Buzz starts at $59,995. It’s not cheap. I wanted the ID.Buzz to be something that families who were cross-shopping Honda CR-Vs and Toyota RAV4s could consider as an alternative. A roomier, quirkier, more fun alternative. All the advantages of a minivan, but, thanks to the striking and novel looks, without the stigma of a minivan. VW used to market the Microbus like this in the ’60s and ’70s, when they were calling it a Station Wagon and pitting it against the CR-Vs and RAV4s of its day, which were mainstream station wagons.

This is what I was hoping for: something between $30 and $40,000 that was a bit more downmarket in its interior and materials. But, as an EV, there’s just no way to pull this off. So, VW had to lean in and make the ID.Buzz an upmarket car to justify the high price.

Granted, it’s very nice; very roomy and all of the materials feel great, and everything feels put together impeccably. There are little Easter Eggs hidden all over the place, embossed into the upholstery, or molded into the plastics.

It’s nice, it’s all really flapping nice, but what I would have preferred is an interior of rubbers and hard-wearing plastics that was more like what a Honda Element’s interior was like: adaptable and rugged.

But, again, it’s not that. It’s $20,000 more than that because batteries are expensive and VW, it seems, is in this business to make money, of all things. So this is what we have, and that’s just how it is.

So What’s It Like?

The ID.Buzz drives like most modern EVs do: quick, smooth, easy. The RWD version has one motor at the rear, as is Microbus tradition, and makes 282 horsepower and 413 pound-feet of torque, good enough to get the Buzz from s stop to 60 mph in (I think) 7.3 seconds, and if you add the extra motor up front for a total of 335 hp, then it seems it can do that in 6.6 seconds.

Compared to Microbuses past, this is pretty much lightspeed, and considering the Buzz weighs almost 6,000 pounds, it’s pretty incredible, considering. It’s not the fastest car out there, but it may just be the fastest electric minivan, definitely the fastest electric two-tone minivan out there.

Handling-wise it’s a tall box, but a tall box with the vast majority of its weight concentrated way down low, between the axles, and as a result it feels quite planted. VW’s driving route that was given to us was surprisingly twisty, so I got a chance to wring the Buzz out in contexts that, let’s be honest, it’s not really likely to find itself in. It’s not a canyon-carver, but it manages to do that better than anyone would think.

The combination of the tall shape and the low-set weight does sort of give it an odd feeling in corners, like you’re riding atop something, or perhaps on a bike holding a tall ficus plant in a heavy, dirt-filled pot.

I can’t complain about how it drives, really, because it drives just fine for the job it needs to do. Besides, I have other stuff I can complain fecklessly about, so stick around.

Space And Packaging And Missed Opportunities

VW is proud of the packaging of the ID.Buzz, and they should be, for the most part. It’s got the same footprint as their faintly absurd fastback SUV, the Atlas Cross Sport, but has vastly more room inside. And it should! It’s a big box!

It’s plenty roomy inside. If interior room for people and cargo is important to you, there really isn’t anything any better, especially when it comes to EVs that aren’t Amazon delivery vans or something.

The long-wheelbase ID.Buzz is a three-row vehicle, and both rows can fold down, which, along with a little platform thing that installs in the rear cargo area, can form a full-length flat floor, suitable for sleeping or laying a vast number of six-foot party subs atop one another, or carrying any number of other long things, like taxidermy’d giraffe heads (including neck).

The rearmost seats can be removed, and quite easily, too. And they slide back in surprisingly easily, too, which I wasn’t expecting. You just kind of align them to those tracks in the floor and they just sort of glide in, satisfyingly.

When the seats are out of the car, I suppose you could sit in them like lawn chairs, if you wanted. Also, I think they resemble those Super Battle Droids from the Star Wars prequels:

Less easy to remove and install is that little shelf thing at the back:

The shelf tilts up, so you can access stuff in those two little drawers VW provides, and to remove them you have to twist out those black-plastic-topped screws in the middle of the base of each of those U-shaped brackets, each of which takes about eleventy heptillion turns to remove.

Still, it does come out, and you can end up with a pretty cavernous space back there, but that space is sadly broken up by the non-removable center bench, and that’s frustrating.

 

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Why couldn’t that bench be removable also, letting the whole of the van become a blank canvas to be filled with whatever you’d want? Of course, if you could do that, you’d probably want something covering the floor other than carpet, because maybe you’d like to stick bicycles or even small motorcycles in there or any number of other possibly dirty gear and equipment?

Of course, this would move away from the more premium interior VW was saddled with providing, for the reasons I stated before and I find too depressing to repeat. But I think there is a real missed opportunity here, because I feel like the interior is where the Buzz lets us down.

The exterior design is great, and does what it needs to do; but the interior lacks any sort of real hook, any sort of compelling something that makes the Buzz unignorable.

What if the interior was designed in a modular way, where you could configure it any way you’d want, with modules for captain’s chairs or benches or folding beds or kitchen units or equipment racks or whatever? VW wouldn’t need to provide all these things, just a good format and set of specifications for the aftermarket to fill.

A more flexible interior for the bus would open up so many new markets, markets that will exist well past when the initial burst of sales from rich nostalgic Boomers finally slows down. Sure, the Chicken Tax prevents VW from selling the cargo version of the ID.Buzz at anything approaching a rational price, but an ID.Buzz with both rear rows removable and interior materials that can take a little abuse could have managed to fill that hole, all nice and legal-like.

The interior is good. There’s nothing really wrong with it, exactly. But it should be more flexible, the middle row should be removable, the flooring should be able to deal better with unclean and ungainly things, and it overall should be more flexible, more customizable, and just more novel than it is.

It Should Have Been A Hybrid

I get this is unfair of me to suggest, since VW doesn’t even really have a hybrid drivetrain in production, but it’s hard not to think that the Buzz would have been a lot better as a series-hybrid or an EV with a range extender. The range of the RWD one is said to be 234 miles by the EPA, and based on the driving I saw, up to 250 miles seemed possible. That’s a decent amount of range, sure, and it can charge at up to speeds of 200 kW, which can take the ID.Buzz’ battery from about 5% to 80% in just over a half hour. That’s not bad.

But, this is an ideal road trip machine. Or, it should be. It’s roomy and comfortable and seems like an ideal vehicle for casual camping and long trips, and the truth is pure EVs just aren’t great at that, at least not yet. Charging stations are more common than they once were, but they’re not as common as gas stations, and they still take a lot longer to use, because even if your car is capable of fast charging, that doesn’t mean that the charger you found is, too.

 

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A hybrid would solve these issues, allowing for the use of gas on road trips and more pure electric for daily driving duties. It seems like it would be ideal. It would also allow for a smaller battery pack which could hopefully translate to less cost, too.

Of course, you’d have to find a place to package the combustion engine (maybe in the space at the rear under that removable shelf? It seems like there should be room there?) I mean, it hardly matters, because the chances of VW coming out with a hybrid variant of the ID.Buzz is about as likely as VW coming out with a hybrid variant of their curry ketchup.

But I still think it’d have made for a better overall vehicle.

Some Lighting And Other Details That Differentiate The American ID.Buzz

I drove the short-wheelbase Euro-market ID.Buzz back in 2022, and while it’s pretty damn close to our long boy, there are some differences. The biggest of which, other than length, has to do with ventilation: there are HVAC controls and vents throughout the back of the van now, along with a pair of opening little square windows inset into each sliding door window.

The US-market cars also have to meet American lighting standards, which, on the good side, means actual side-marker lamps and reflectors:

The taillights are also different from the Euro version, but not really in a good way, because, for the usual inexplicable reasons, the amber rear indicators, which included this nice little bit of animation:

…here in the US, we get indicators that light up like this:

I’m not sure what that lower lens gets used for, if anything, in the US-spec light.

Here in America, we also have, as you’d expect, an American-wall-style power outlet in place of the Euro-style outlet, though its placement still baffles me:

It’s on the base of the front seat, in the passenger’s footwell. Why not put this in the rear? Or even more accessible for the middle rows? It feels like an ill-considered place for a wall outlet.

Let Me Conclude Already

I like the ID.Buzz. I really do. There’s just not that much like it on the market today, and I like that. It has the visual novelty of something like a Cybertruck, but with a completely different tone; less aggressive, less likely to bore you talking about crypto, more likely to bore you talking about concerts seen decades ago.

It looks fun, it’s practical, has good range, drives well, all that. But at the same time this isn’t just the new Sienna or Pacifica, this is the new Microbus and as such, I expect something more, something different.

What we got isn’t bad; it’s like if the old Microbus was this crazy artist you used to know, who did some really exciting and novel work back in the day. Now they’re a highly successful product designer and they make a ton of money, but they’ve definitely lost that special edge they used to have. They grew up.

You can’t blame them for taking the high-paying job and being comfortable and successful, just as I can’t blame VW for making a premium EV out of the Bus. They did what they needed to do.

But, that doesn’t mean I can’t wish things were a bit different. Because I do.

I’ll Never Get Tired Of Driving Old VW Microbuses And You’ll Never Guess What Car Is Less Aerodynamic Than The Bus

VW’s 22-Year Old Modern Microbus Concept Was Shockingly Close To The ID.Buzz EV Bus We Got

2023 VW ID.Buzz First Drive: Why This Electric Van Is So Important For Volkswagen And For EVs Overall