Volkswagen ID 3 2020 prototype first drive

As is now applicable almost universally to new EVs, the ID 3’s heavy lithium ion drive batteries sit under the cabin floor. That’s the principal reason why VW can claim a perfect 50:50 weight distribution for a rear-engined car – although bigger MEB-based ID models will be able to offer four-wheel drive by simply adding another smaller drive motor and gearbox onto the front axle.

But while that battery layout is widely championed as the way to resist compromise to both interior packaging and handling dynamics in an EV, that’s not absolutely true in the ID 3’s case. Even though this is a fairly tall hatchback, it’s one with a pretty average amount of head room. For a 4.2-metre car, however, it has remarkable leg room, thanks to a wheelbase that’s nearly 2.8 metres long: 130mm longer than that of a MkVII Volkswagen Golf.

The car’s profile is high, cabin-forward and quite aerodynamic-looking. Although styled very differently, it puts you in mind of the proportions of the BMW i3 – which, given it’s another compact, rear-engined EV, would make sense. The ID3 is a size bigger than the BMW, though, and an order more conventional-looking, with properly usable back seats and a decent boot.

The ID3’s two-tone, grey-on-crème cloth front seats were one of the few uncovered parts of the interior that we could look at. They seat you in a pretty unremarkable but sound driving position, at a steering wheel of a good size; but you look out through a steeply raked windscreen, and over a particularly short bonnet that drops away quickly out of sight. Both of those facts make it harder than you expect to judge the forward extremity of the car, and to get a good, instinctive feel for its size in traffic.

Answering why VW went for such a ‘fast’ windscreen on such a compact car aside from the obvious aerodynamic reasons, our chaperone told me they simply needed a lot of space on the top of the dashboard to accommodate the car’s giant-sized head-up display. That will be used to project augmented-reality navigation arrows, hazard alerts and pedestrian detection right onto the underside of the windscreen in top-of-the-range versions.

Much as it would be over-simplifying to suggest that sounds like putting the cart before the horse where car design is concerned, it’s certainly evidence that we’re now well and truly in the age of the all-pervading primacy of in-car technology. At the time, I couldn’t think of another example of driver display technology influencing the exterior design of a production car in quite the same way – and I still can’t. And at that cost, I’d want it to be the very best augmented-reality head-up display in the world. Since it’ll be the only one such system, we can at least take that for granted.

The ID 3 is quiet, brisk, responsive and particularly easy to drive around town, which is exactly how the vast majority of EVs that we report on are. The 201bhp and 229lb ft outputs produced by the electric drive motor feel like plenty to get the car up and away from low speeds quickly. But, because that torque is so accessible and motor response is so good, you seldom use more than half-throttle in the car. Oddly, the ID 3’s urban performance superiority actually ends up just allowing you to relax and take it easy the vast majority of the time – and that suits the general vibe of the car very well.

The car has medium-paced, fairly light steering, although because it has such a lot of steering angle, there’s approaching three-and-a-half turns between locks. This makes it feel ideally suited to car parks, traffic islands and junctions. With that much steering angle, you never need two bites to get in or out of a parking bay, and seldom need to reverse either when needing to U-turn at a T-junction. The ID3 is a real champion of manoeuvrability. 

It’s also an agile car at town speed, with strongish grip levels and good lateral body control, and is well capable of a keen change of direction when you need one. It doesn’t quite match the darting, gap-grabbing fleet-footedness of a BMW i3, but is still well at home in city traffic. Moreover, it also has that sense of measured, natural responsiveness in everything it does that so often marks out a VW, and that makes for such easy, top-level drivability.

Fluent but effective vertical body control and a supple ride are also dynamic qualities you also expect from a VW, but they’re not always to be found in smaller electric cars with lots of mass to keep in check. They were hard to assess on our short, low-speed, trunk-road test route, but there was enough evidence to suggest that there’s still work to be done to make the ID 3 – which comes on wheels up to 20in in diameter – hit the company’s familiar high standards on ride sophistication. Our test car had a slightly busy, though not overly noisy, secondary ride, though the fine-tuning of its dampers could well have been an outstanding item on the engineer’s to-do list.