Electric Volkswagen ID.3 CAN do 330 miles on a single charge with the 58kWh battery

With Volkswagen betting the farm on EVs, they’ve sent a hypermiler out to see what the ID.3 can do on a single charge. The answer is 330 miles.

There’s an awful lot resting on the success of Volkswagen’s ID family of electric cars, with the ID.3 now (almost) on sale properly, and the new ID.4 soon to be officially revealed, so it’s time to start ramming the message home that electric cars really are fit for purpose.

Ignoring the thorny issue of price (too much) and ease of charging (still too patchy and unreliable), what VW want you to know is that you really don’t need to have range anxiety if you’re brave enough to jump in to a new ID.3.

So they enlisted renowned ‘Hypermiler’ Felix Egolf (a man with the perfect name for driving an electric VW) to take a production ID.3 – a First Edition model with the ‘middle’ 58kWh battery – off on a jaunt from Zwickau in Germany, where the ID cars are built, to Schaffhausen in Switzerland.

Egolf used public roads for his trip, but employed tactics like cruising and slip-streaming to boost range, although with a camera crew onboard and stuff like running lights and HVAC on at least some of the time, it was a realistic effort, with average speeds of 35mph. The result is that Egolf managed to squeeze 330 miles out of a single charge – some 26 per cent more than the ID.3’s official range.

It’s a more real-world effort to squeeze extra range out of an EV than Hyundai’s recent 635 miles in a Kona Electric, and although an owner is unlikely to see anything close it does demonstrate what is actually possible.

Now, just fix the high prices and lousy charging network and we’ll all be driving volts.

Volkswagen ID.3 ‘Hypermile’ Video