It’s fair to say I’m very much enjoying it. It’s a Moonstone Grey mid 2023 model registered in Jan 2024 which I got from dealer stock. There’s just the two models in the Mid 2023 update and this is the Pro, so 58KW and 3.7 software. It actually turns out that it was wrongly designated from the factory as having Art Velour comfort seats and this was one of the reasons I chose this particular car. There was a factory document from Wolfsburg in the car confirming the issue and I’ve seen others advertised on Autotrader with the same issue (those being detailed as having two different seats in fact). It turned up with the Taia seats and I ended up getting compensation for the mistake which the dealer should have detected. It was a no cost option so wasn’t costing me anything additional in terms of price.
Interior
On the whole I find the interior is really nice and I believe there have been improvements from initial ID.3 models regarding the dashboard. I think it might be a faux leather dash (looks like leather but I haven’t found any info on it). It’s pretty spacious in the back and has some good storage areas. According to my passengers it’s a bit of a firmer ride than the Golf however. The large central storage area makes up for the small glove box.
Controls
I’ve seen various reviewers complain about the combined electric window switches on the drivers door and the lack of backlighting on the heating/volume controls. I find I rarely need to adjust the rear windows (how often does a driver need to open the rears anyway?) and have hardly touched the volume or heating controls so not sure it’s really such a big deal, for me anyway.
Apart from being a little sluggish at times, the main screen works really well. A few things can be trickier to find but it’s well laid out and there’s loads of features. The ambient lighting gives endless fun for my son, the sat nav is great with traffic updates, and small things like the quick options when you finish a journey to set the charge level, air-con, and alarm are all well thought out I find. First time I’ve been able to easily figure out how to set the wipers in service mode too.
I always set the trip computer to display the speed in my Golf which meant I couldn’t see the economy or other data items. The ID.3 binnacle displays all the items I find useful together with the exception of what’s playing music wise.
Performance
It’s a good bit more powerful than my Golf and although it’s the same to 60 as one of my old hot hatches, the way the power is delivered is hugely different. In terms of EV’s it’s not anything to shout about in terms of figures but it just feels effortless to overtake slower moving traffic. There’s no thinking about gear changes, the torque is instant, and you can be confident on single carriageways that you’ll have plenty time to get back in.
Safety assists
There’s quite a few safety features on this and most of them seem to be working well. I found that when an impatient driver decided to pass queueing traffic on the other side of the road meaning he was driving head on towards me, the ID.3 dash binnacle goes into angry mode! A big red bar and it beeps away! I’m pretty sure this was a different type of alert to the one I got when I looked out my window when approaching traffic, it was a less angry alert that time (although I could be wrong). Lane Assist… the jury is out on that one. I don’t know if it’s the dodgy roads we have where they can’t paint lines properly but I don’t like the way the ID.3 actively moves the steering wheel. More often than not it gets turned off. Reading the release notes it seems that VW has actually turned down the aggressiveness of this so I hate to think what it used to be like.
So all in all it has been great so far. I know there were “niggles” with the ID.3 when it first came out and I don’t know how many folk have the newer one so thought it might be useful to provide some details on my experience. Cheers!
