VW ID.3 charging hard in Germany and up the charts in Norway

November 7, 2020November 8, 2020 John Carey 2107 Views VW ID.3, VW ID.3 77kWh

While a professional record-setting driver charges all over Germany in an ID.3, the new EV from VW has surged to best-seller status in Norway for the month of October.

Rainer Zietlow and his co-pilot are more than halfway through a two-month itinerary drawn up by the Institute for Transport Logistics at Dortmund Technical University. He’s so far driven a pre-production ID.3 with a 77kWh battery more than 14,000km.

Zietlow is famed for slightly crazy long-distance driving feats in VWs, including one in 2012 from Melbourne to St Petersburg. He’s also set a driving altitude record in the mountains of Chile and was the first person ever to drive a natural-gas fuelled vehicle around the world.

His mission with the big-battery version of the ID.3, due to go into production in the first half of next year, is to check the health of Germany’s public fast-charging infrastructure while quickly covering a lot of kilometres.

Rainer Zietlow connects the ID.3 to another DC fast charger

Zietlow has logged visits to more than 350 DC fast-charge stations so far, with another 300 or so to go. He’s found that a majority of the stations visited were able to supply the maximum 125kW charging rate the VW can take.

Check this German-language website to see where he’s been. There’s a map (which will make Australia EV fans weep) and a huge image gallery to look at…

www.id3-deutschlandtour.com

The car is averaging just under 20kWh/100km, according to Zietlow, but the ID.3’s energy consumption can be much lower than this. “It’s interesting to see that we are using the least energy in city traffic, of all places, where combustion engines of conventional cars consume the most fuel,” he said. “In our ID.3 this is 15 kWh for every 100 km.”

While the official WLTP range of the 77kWh ID.3 is up to 549km, so far Zietlow’s longest distance between recharges is 420km.

“Indian Summer” during the ID.3-Deutschlandtour near Wohratal, Hessen.

Meanwhile, the 300km-plus real-world range of the 58kWh version of the ID.3 that’s already in production is enough for many Norwegians. In October the VW EV accounted for nearly 20 percent of all new cars sold in the country.

With a population of a little more than 5 million, Norway isn’t large, but sustained government encouragement has created an outsize appetite there for EVs. Norwegians bought 2745 new ID.3s in October. It outsold the second-placed RAV4 by more than three to one.

Across Europe as a whole the Model 3 remains the best-selling EV, but it seems inevitable that as more versions of the ID.3 become available Tesla’s primacy will be challenged by VW.

John Carey

Grew up in country NSW, way back when petrol was laced with lead. Has written about cars and the car business for more than 35 years, working full-time and freelance for leading mags, major newspapers and websites in Australia and (sometimes) overseas. Avidly interested in core EV technologies like motors and batteries, and believes the switch to electromobility definitely should be encouraged. Is waiting patiently for someone to make a good and affordable EV that will fit inside his tiny underground garage in northern Italy, where he's lived for the past decade. Likes the BMW i3, but it's just too damned wide...