Dear Volkswagen,
We were certainly dismayed by your recent decision to delay the debut of the electric Volkswagen ID.7 on our side of the pond. (And by "we," I mean me and the one other American on our team who drove it and liked it.) The ID.7 is a sleek and stylish car that's incredibly comfortable, so much so that it's arguably the best electric road trip machine this side a Lucid Air. It's got a ton of first-rate tech, offers a wholly different character and experience than the ID.4 crossover and is convincingly premium without a pretentious luxury badge.
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VW delays the ID.7 sedan's release in North America
Citing "market conditions," Volkswagen is pushing back the ID.7 electric sedan's launch in America to some unknown later date. The sedan, assumed to cost around $50,000, would've been VW's second modern fully electric model in the U.S.
At the same time... yeah. We get it.
This is not a particularly auspicious time to launch an electric sedan into the North American market, especially one expected to range from $50,000 to $60,000—all without the benefit of EV tax credits because it's built in Germany. Americans rightfully want much more affordable EVs, and that's the way the market is rapidly shifting.
Plus, and I hate to say this, your dealers have a point—the car would've been a tough sell over here. Plus, you guys haven't had an amazing track record with sedans in modern times. The Jetta certainly still puts numbers on the board. But how's the Passat these days? I wouldn't know, since you discontinued it entirely in our market. And as for the Arteon, to which the ID.7 is a kind of spiritual successor, your dealers were basically giving those away toward the end. That's not a situation you can afford, literally or figuratively, with your electric models.
But here at InsideEVs, we're in the solutions business. So we have one for you today. Meet what I call the Volkswagen ID.7 Tourer Alltrack. Cooked up by InsideEVs' Advanced Research Projects Agency (aka, our digital artist Theophilus Chin) we think it's a lot closer to what American buyers want than the ID.7 sedan.
The best part is that you're already halfway there. You take the new Volkswagen ID.7 Tourer wagon—which looks spectacular, by the way, stellar work there—and you add something Americans absolutely love: some plastic body cladding and a couple of inches of ride height.
We all know that in this country, the only people who truly appreciate wagons are weird internet car nerds who never actually buy them when they're new. So the ID.7 Tourer Alltrack takes that basic design and turns it into something Americans love—a crossover. Such a car appeals directly to who we are as a people; it's got tons of ride height and all-wheel-drive capability, rugged and ready, practically begging to plunder nature on an individual level. And what could be more American than that?
You know this playbook exists. It's how your corporate cousins at Audi can sell the A6 wagon over here. Ditto for Mercedes and the E-Class wagon, as of late. Even Porsche is only offering us the Taycan Cross Turismo, at least for now. It is now functionally Subaru's entire business model.
Heck, even you know that at least for a time, the Volkswagen Golf Alltrack (which is where we got the name for this) made up a pretty sizable percentage of Golf wagon sales over here. My point is, you have to meet your audience where it's at. And where we're at is we love large, lifted cars that we think are SUVs but really aren't deep down.
Plus, you'd have an enormous advantage here in that there's basically nothing in this segment in our country—not right now, anyway. Europe gets all the electric "estate cars" and no automaker has really bothered with the high-riding wagon segment. Could it run up against ID.4 sales? Maybe, but not in volume, and this play has a better chance at moving units than either the sedan or the regular wagon would.
Just think about it, Volkswagen. It may even work. But if you don't get to it, chances are Rivian will someday instead.
Illustrations credit Theophilus Chin
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
