Our Volkswagen ID4 Is Costing Us Pennies to Run

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I had the best of intentions when I accepted the responsibility of shepherding MotorTrend's long-term 2022 Volkswagen ID4 Pro for 12 months. I was (and still am) genuinely curious what the ownership—er, loanership—experience would be like, especially from a cost perspective. But it took a surprising amount of time, effort, and aggravation to calculate what it costs to drive VW's Tesla Model 3 fighter, especially when it's charged at home.

We'll get to the complaints later, but first the good news: Our VW ID4 is costing us around $0.07 per mile by our math. How did we arrive at this number? We record a slew of data points every time we charge, religiously tracking the miles we travel, how many kilowatts the ID4 accepts when we plug it in, and the cost. We follow VW's guidance on charging as often as we can, and we usually charge to 80 percent (good for about 220 miles of range), reserving a full 100 percent and 275-mile charge for rare long hauls.

As the vehicle's chaperone, I've been using it for my short work commute and running my 2-year-old to daycare and activities during the week. This is almost entirely short trips of city driving. Outside of very occasional and nearly disastrous road trips, I've been charging it almost exclusively at home, via a Wallbox Pulsar Plus home charger I had professionally installed (you can see/read about it here). I spent $800 to have a local electrician install a 240-volt (NEMA 14-50) plug, upgrade my electrical panel with a 60-amp breaker, and mount the Pulsar Plus charging unit and cable management socket. My Wallbox Pulsar Plus is adjustable from 16 amps to 40 amps (Wallbox has one model that goes up to 48 amps) via the Wallbox smartphone app, which connects via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and can be controlled by Google or Amazon Alexa voice assistants. More on the best chargers to consider in this post.

Back to $0.07 per mile. How did we get that? By dividing the cost of each charging session by the number of miles traveled on the last charge. The Wallbox unit helps out here, calculating the cost of each charging session by multiplying the charging time by the energy cost entered by the user. I live in Los Angeles and have a tiered rate plan from my electricity provider, Southern California Edison. After the Wallbox was installed, I consulted the technical experts at MT for help in choosing the most representative rate. Given I had not yet figured out how to automatically set the ID4 to charge at the lowest rate ("super off peak"—more on this later), we decided to go with a crude and conservative rate of $0.36 per kWh. This number was calculated by taking the total cost of one month's bill and dividing it by the total kWh used, even though off peak tiers were significantly less—as low as $0.30 per kWh for "mid peak" and recently falling to as low as $0.23 per kWh for "super off peak."

So how does this stack up? Right in line with everyone's favorite/hated EV brand, Tesla. Per our handy guide on Tesla charging, a Model 3, the ID4's direct competitor, costs anywhere from $0.03 to $0.10 per mile to drive, if you charge at home, depending on which model you get and the cost of electricity in your area. Per that article, you can also see that the ID4, at $0.07 per mile, beats the internal-combustion-only vehicles we looked at and is on par with a Toyota Prius, one of the most efficient non-electric vehicles currently sold. Pretty sweet for the pocketbook, yes? Definitely, but not without a sour aftertaste; this all could have been and should have been much simpler.

VW doesn't make it easy to figure out how much it costs to charge your ID4. The car doesn't provide this information (or if it does, it's buried somewhere inaccessible in the infotainment system). It will allow you to select when the charging session starts (after it's been plugged in), so that you can theoretically take advantage of better rates from your electricity provider and/or pre-condition the vehicle and battery before your selected departure time, but the system is clunky. And you have to know your rates or have your electric bill handy, as even in this "car-as-smartphone" era, apparently this information can't be pulled in by the car or the myVW mobile app, either.

The Wallbox was the solution to calculating charging costs, but it still wasn't perfect. The mobile app is pretty basic; you have to have your rates handy to input into the app. But the most aggravating part of the cost tracking was that, in my configuration, the Wallbox app only works when I was in Bluetooth range of the charger. This meant I couldn't remotely access charging session information and had to laboriously screen-capture sessions while standing next to the charger for later entry into our editorial spreadsheet. Too many steps. Can this be solved by connecting the Wallbox charger to the home Wi-Fi system? Perhaps—we will confirm soon.