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The other day I had the privilege of driving the brand new 2021 Volkswagen ID.4. In terms of technology the car had quite a few interesting things. To start with on the door instead of having four window switches they’re only two and then directly in front of them there’s a soft touch button that says rear and if you touch that then the two front window switches in turn will operate the rear windows. Sometimes I think manufacturers put things in cars just to do something different. In this case I would rather of had four window switches, instead having to use that “Rear” button to switch back and forth, other than the switches worked fine and alll 4 windows are auto up and down.
Moving on from the door to where the light switches normally are to the left of the steering wheel, those too, were all what I called soft touch button so no actual physical button just a piece of plastic that you touch. There was some haptic feedback on most of the switches which was nice but again, I would’ve just rather had a physical button or dial for something as basic as lights.
Moving up from there to the drivers information screen or dashboard as it’s sometimes called, VW did put in a very basic interface that’s attached to the steering column and will tilt along with the steering wheel when it tilts reminiscent of the Ford Probe. The information presented on the screen was the driver safety systems on the left and that picture could go from small to be a large size with a swipe on the view button on the right side of the steering wheel, A Digital Speedometer, Turn-by-Turn Navigation shows up when Navigation is activated, and then you had your gear selections on the far left. At least they put the basics there. I would think that when you’re rolling out the first edition of a brand new vehicle, you would want to make the best impression possible and I would’ve loved to of seen a dashboard that contain a whole lot more information plus a heads up display which they did not have.
Talking about steering wheel controls these were also soft touch so again no physical button just basically a plastic piece that you touched with your hand. It will be interesting to see in cold weather states how well that works with gloves on. Once again maybe I’m more of a traditionalist but I would’ve preferred to have had buttons that actually click, as I again, think that there are somethings manufacturers just put on a car just to make it different and end up making it more difficult to run it then making it easier.
Moving over to the infotainment screen. The infotainment screen itself contained a lot of good information was fairly intuitive to use however it was slow to respond which has been a complaint since the first review on the car. I’m hoping that with an over the air update, which this is capable of, they will fix that slowness. To give you an example I asked voice command to do something and it spun for 30 seconds before I finally just canceled it. To be fair I did I did get it to plot a course in navigation for me but most of the things I tried I simply canceled out instead of waiting for it to complete the instruction.
All the buttons that were around the touchscreen infotainment center we’re also the soft touch kind meaning it was simply a piece of plastic that you just placed your hand on. Again I’m wondering how well that will work in cold weather states with gloves on. If you’re thinking about purchasing one of these and you live in a cold-weather state you might want to think about investing in a pair of gloves that have the touch sensitivity pads sowed into them on all your fingers not just one.
If they could fix the slowness of the system and it’s real time ability to respond to a touch or a voice command in a much quicker fashion, the system itself would be a very good system as it has all the technology built into it it has all the options that you would want to see, it’s just slow to respond to touch and slow to respond to voice command which makes it frustrating to use.
I also hope down the road with an interior update they will take out a lot of those soft touch buttons and put in actual buttons that you can push in and out, I just think they’re just easier to operate.
So overall the technology on the id4 seemed like it wasn’t quite ready for consumer use. Great ideas, but in some cases like all the soft touch buttons a little bit of overkill and in the case of the unresponsiveness of the infotainment system and voice command not quite ready for prime time yet. If they update the responsiveness of the system and voice command they’ll have a good product on their hand.
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