Is the VW ID Buzz Cute Enough to Make You Forget Range Anxiety? We’re Going to Find Out.

When filling out official questionnaires, consumers are about as unlikely to rank styling or design as a top priority when buying an SUV or van as you are to admit you chose your partner based solely on their looks. Letting aesthetics outweigh practical, objective factors in major life decisions seems thoughtless, superficial, and ill-advised. Volkswagen appears to question this truism.

The 2025 Volkswagen ID Buzz is a vehicle so objectively cute, cool, and iconic in its design that it blatantly dares buyers to ignore practical considerations like price, range, charging speed, and passenger or cargo space flexibility. And yet, here we are in mid-2026, launching a year-long test with an unsold 2025 Buzz. (The model skipped the 2026 model year and will return shortly for 2027.) Blow me if it hasn’t charmed us to the point that one of our staff’s biggest EV long-trip range complainers didn’t just return from a long journey with a smile. Will the novelty wear off and the extended travel times change that over the course of a year? Stay tuned to find out.

Despite the model-year delay, we specced our ID Buzz exactly as we wanted it: in Candy White over Energetic Orange ($995) with a Dune bench second-row interior (its standard Creamsicle accents pair best with the orange exterior). The most affordable way to get that combo in 2025 was on the mid-grade Pro S Plus trim (a $3,500 upgrade) with rear-wheel drive. The rear motor best mimics the original bus and was the only powertrain offered with seven-passenger seating (the middle bench suits our pets better and will reduce our temptation to ever squeeze a third unbelted child into the back).

Our biggest splurge was the $1,495 electrochromic panoramic roof. We already know the milky-white translucent setting in this polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) setup can’t match an opaque shade for brightness, but how well does it reduce heat gain? We’ll let you know. The rest was accessorising: $479 bought roof-rack crossbars (still to be DIY-installed), a charging cable capable of plugging into 120- or 240-volt outlets ($360), cool vintage Chilewich-look floor mats ($300), plus other niceties that brought the total to $69,109.

We’ve put the Buzz through our full test regimen and found it to perform almost identically to the one tested during our 2025 Car of the Year programme (no surprise, as it weighs only 55 pounds more). It ended up falling 15 miles short of our other rear-driver in our Road-Trip Range test (213 vs. 228 miles, or 9 percent below the 234-mile EPA rating). Those are very low numbers in a vehicle segment optimised for family holidays.

Worse still, its 400-volt electrical architecture is only rated to charge at a maximum of 200 kW. But in our charging test, this one maxed at 204 kW—well up from the 175 we drew in our next-best-charging Buzz, with both drawing from 350-kW Electrify America towers. That helped charge back to 100 percent in 45 minutes—about 15 minutes quicker than any previous Buzz. And its first 15 minutes of charging added 112 miles—20 percent more than our next-best-charging ID Buzz 4Motion. Energetic Orange for the win? Charging system built on a Wednesday?

We love endearing touches like the “play” and “pause” icons on the accelerator and brake. It’s neat that the seating and console allow a driver to easily slide out to exit via the passenger door (in case there’s ever something too close to the driver’s door). The interior materials quality and the massaging seats with three screen-selectable programmes and a hard button on the seat to restart them all seem befitting the $69K price tag.

We have high hopes that our button-cute bus will continue to overdeliver on its under-promising spec sheet as we rack up the road-tripping and camping miles, perhaps adding some vinyl or magnetic flowers and peace signs along the way.