Volkswagen ID.Buzz: Green Car Reports Best Car To Buy 2025 finalist

• In U.S. form, ID.Buzz is larger, more powerful, with price over $60,000
• Up to 234 miles of EPA range, from 10-80% in as little as 26 min.
• No bidirectional charging or campervan as of yet

The Volkswagen ID.Buzz is one of the most head-turning, attention-getting new vehicles available at any price. And that’s even before some people know or care that it’s electric. That alone is one of several reasons why it’s one of Green Car Reports’ Best Car To Buy 2025 finalists—but its appeal and its significance to the market go much deeper than that. 

VW struck a smart balance between retro and modern for the ID.Buzz. It’s a smile-maker and nostalgia machine from first take, but spend more time inside and around and you’ll find a deeper appreciation for it. Not only is it quiet, pleasant-riding, and reasonably nimble for a van; it also won’t drive you crazy with compromises for the sake of cuteness, in the way VW did with its New Beetle. The Buzz, instead, serves up just the right amount of retro-fun on the outside—especially borrowing the face of the original ‘50s and ‘60s air-cooled vans, and their two-tone looks—while its side profile and package itself says pragmatic Eurovan evolution and inside it’s thoroughly modern.  

But what a long, strange trip it’s been. VW formally announced in 2017, at that year’s Monterey Car Week activities in California, that it would be bringing the I.D. Buzz to production, and at the time we took that to mean this would be a model catching first and foremost onto the waves of California VW Bus nostalgia. Seven years later it’s just reaching that market after being available in Europe for nearly two and a half years, and three and a half years after the U.S. arrival of the closely related ID.4 crossover. How was it not a priority?

For the U.S., the 2025 Volkswagen ID.Buzz has evolved, and it only comes in a three-row form, measuring 195.4 inches long overall and riding on a notably long 127.5-inch wheelbase—about a 10-inch stretch versus the two-row version that Europe got starting more than two years ago. An overall height of 76.2 inches will clear most garages, and Its 6.1 inches of ground clearance should be just enough for unpaved trails on the way to hiking or camping, but there’s no air-suspension adjustability here or serious off-road claims. 

With that, the ID.Buzz has more power in the form arriving to the U.S.—282 hp in single-motor rear-wheel-drive form, or 335 hp combined in AWD form with dual motors—and it gets a larger 91-kwh (86-kwh usable) battery pack, good for up to 234 miles of EPA range. Road-trip charging stops shouldn’t keep you waiting very long, with a 10-80% charge in as little as 26 minutes (although there’s no bidirectional charging as of yet). The infotainment system is much-improved and comes with a pretty well-integrated trip planner that can roll with changes of plans or new waypoints and smartly preconditions the battery pack for the quickest charge when needed. 

Our initial real-world driving results suggest that the ID.Buzz can outdo those EPA ratings with a light load and mild weather. Don’t expect it to keep up with all of today’s sporty electric crossovers; it drives heavy (AWD versions weigh nearly 6,200 pounds). But with a quiet, well-damped heft, and in dual-motor form its 6.0-second 0-60 mph time is by no means sluggish. 

Inside, there is a lot of flexibility and some great seats sized and contoured for adults. But a close examination starts to reveal some cracks in the packaging. Its tall console between the front seats can lift fully out of the vehicle, and a just-right seat height, plenty of bin storage, and an ace electrochromic glass roof in top versions helps the ID.Buzz hit all the right notes for being a great alternative to SUVs. But those in the back seat lack storage for odds and ends, and the ID.Buzz may fail the Americans’ Cupholder 101 course. Further, with an uneven floor and a lack of true fold-flat third-row seats of the sort you’ll find in gasoline minivans—or the Lucid Gravity, to show it’s possible in a three-row EV—it’s a mixed bag. 

The other question near and dear to us is this: Why is it so expensive, and why did it have to be this way? The ID.Buzz starts at $61,545, including the $1,550 destination fee, and it ranges up to $71,545 in AWD form for the top 1st Edition. 

The Buzz is based on the same Modular Electric Toolkit (MEB) architecture as the ID.4 originally destined for a million EVs a year by 2025. Seeing that VW has likened its transition to EVs to when it had to shift from air-cooled to water-cooled vehicles, it feels like a missed opportunity of the grandest scale. Here it is, one of the most iconic shoestring, frame-and-canvas mass-market vehicles in automotive history, and VW is marketing the modern iteration as a luxury niche vehicle, versus the likes of the Rivian R1S or loaded Kia EV9—when it could have been quite the $45,000 model driven by a mother lode of VW accessories and conversions for dealerships to delight over. 

To that, there may be many more electric vans on the way that allow such flexibility. The more we ponder the place of the ID.Buzz in the EV market, the more it feels like a turning point—one in which, much like the counterculture the original Bus came to symbolize, it challenges the shape of the future. 

Does the VW ID.Buzz outshine the other four Best Car To Buy 2025 Finalists? Check back Jan. 6.