Volkswagen needs a hit. The ID.Buzz probably won’t be it.
On Tuesday, VW announced US pricing for the long-awaited electric reinterpretation of its iconic Microbus. We knew the ID.Buzz would be expensive, but sheesh, this thing really isn't cheap. It costs $61,545, while the 1st Edition with all-wheel drive is another $10,000 dearer. And on top of that, the Buzz’s range disappoints—234 miles for the rear-drive version, 231 miles for the all-wheel drive.
Dieselgate forced Volkswagen’s hand, pushing the company hard towards EVs. It also turned public opinion against the automaker, a hurdle VW has yet to overcome. The ID.Buzz, a shameless nostalgia play at VW’s golden era, could’ve papered over some of VW’s sins and generated—sorry—buzz for the brand’s coming line of ID models. Instead, this Bus feels too little, too late, and too expensive.
Imagine if the ID.Buzz came out as VW’s first ID car in 2019 or 2020, with a price starting around $40,000. Perhaps wishful thinking, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that at a lower price, and with a much earlier release, the ID.Buzz could’ve been a moment, the return of a beloved icon at a relatively attainable price. It could’ve had a real cultural impact at a time when EV adoption felt more cautious and critical, and it could’ve changed the conversation around VW.
Instead, VW launched the ID brand with the (not-sold-in-America) ID.3 and ID.4, both of which were disappointments. The "3" in ID.3 signified VW’s third game changer, after the Beetle and the Golf. Now, it seems VW will drop the ID.3 entirely in favor of… an electric Golf… which it once sold as the E-Golf, then canceled, only to revive. Apparently.
VW’s huge Dieselgate penalties, combined with heavy and sudden investment in an EV range, meant the automaker had to cost-cut the hell out of its cars. That manifested in the ID models and its gas cars. We went from the Mk7 Golf, a high water mark for the model and one of the nicest cars in the world at any price, to the Mk8, defined by its cheap-feeling interior, user-hostile haptic controls, and a truly baffling infotainment system. The recent Golf facelift aims to right at least some of these wrongs, but the damage was done.
So now we live in a world where people are apathetic about Volkswagen at best, hostile at worst. In comes the ID.Buzz.
We know it has a lot of the same haptic controls people already hate in the Golf, though the Buzz at least has the VW’s newer and seemingly better infotainment system. Still, it is a $60,000-plus Volkswagen minivan. The Boomers nostalgic for VW’s 1960s glory can probably afford it, but one imagines the market for the Buzz is pretty niche.
Plus, it arrives years late, as consumer interest in EVs cools (if not becomes outright hostile, depending on your political slant). Rightly or wrongly, Americans also want range, and sub-250 miles for this sort of money makes ID.Buzz an even harder sell.
Motor1 editorial director Travis Okulski posits that the ID.Buzz could be like the Lotus Elise. When the car finally came to America in 2005, those who wanted an Elise immediately bought them. Then sales cratered. That first year was by far the best for Elise sales, with 3,321 in the U.S. By 2011, its final year, Lotus sold 178 Elise… which was actually up from 2010, when it sold just 95.
And as our colleagues at InsideEVs noted yesterday, automakers need expensive EVs to be successful. It doesn’t cost automakers much more to build a larger, nicer car than to build a cheaper, smaller one. So the auto industry would rather sell fewer of the former than more of the latter. But automakers actually have to sell those larger cars in the first place. It’s hard to see VW moving a lot of ID.Buzzes at this price and time.
You can’t help but imagine what could’ve been. Change a couple details in its story and the ID.Buzz could’ve been the thing that got people excited about VW and its ID line when that’s what the brand needed most. Imagine if VW had caught the #vanlife craze in full swing?
Of course, Dieselgate always signaled a decline in VW quality from the exceptional heights of the Mk7 Golf. But positive sentiment generated by the Buzz could’ve softened the blow.
Instead, we get an expensive niche product that comes long after VW’s hard-earned goodwill has evaporated. Put another way, the ID.Buzz is what Volkswagen will try to sell you, but far from what the company needs.
