Volkswagen Kills the ID.4 Badge to Build an Honest ID. Tiguan

Volkswagen opened European order books on October 9, 2026, for the new ID. Tiguan at a base price of 42,695 euros. European customer deliveries are scheduled to begin in early 2027. The debut marks the end of the line for the ID.4 and ID.5 badges, retiring both nameplates after roughly 950,000 units built worldwide.

Volkswagen has sold over 8.3 million gas and diesel Tiguans across three generations since 2007. A family buyer walking into a dealership understands what a Tiguan badge means on the tailgate. Alpha-numeric labels cooked up by marketing consultants rarely build that kind of multi-decade goodwill.

The ID.4 arrived in late 2020 carrying sluggish touchscreens, software bugs, and frustrating cabin controls. Technicians spent years replacing failed modules while owners complained about frozen infotainment displays. Wolfsburg spent six years trying to convince ordinary motorists that capacitive touch strips were superior to physical switches.

The ID. Tiguan scraps the electronic door latches and returns to mechanical handles connected to standard latch cables. In the United States and Europe, the previous electronic latches triggered multiple safety recalls because water seeped inside and unlatched doors while the car was in motion. When moisture causes a latch to fail on the highway, complex electronics become a genuine safety hazard.

Physical buttons are back on the steering wheel spokes. If you press a volume button on this wheel, you feel a distinct mechanical click. You will no longer mute the radio by brushing the spoke with your palm during a tight parking maneuver.

Driver-side armrests now house four individual window switches. In the ID.4, Volkswagen removed two window switches to trim manufacturing costs, forcing drivers to tap a temperamental capacitive pad labeled “Rear” just to lower the back glass. Why it took company executives four years to admit that four dedicated switches belong on a family car is a mystery. I do not have a polite answer for that brand of stubbornness.

Under the hood, Volkswagen carved out a 32-liter storage compartment. The ID.4 had open space under the hood cowl, but the factory sealed it under plastic and left buyers without a front trunk. That gives you space to store a dirty charging cable instead of putting it on top of your luggage in the 534-liter rear cargo bay.

The crossover rides on Volkswagen’s updated MEB Plus platform, which brings updated battery packaging and power electronics. Base models feature a 58-kilowatt-hour lithium iron phosphate pack, while long-range versions carry a 77-kilowatt-hour nickel-manganese-cobalt battery. Volkswagen rates the larger pack for up to 600 kilometers on the European WLTP testing cycle, which works out to roughly 372 miles.

Halve the WLTP highway rating to roughly get the practical cold-weather range. In heavy highway driving through a winter rainstorm, expect closer to 200 to 220 miles before hunting for a plug. The car pulls up to 165 kilowatts on a DC fast charger, recharging from ten to eighty percent in 28 minutes.

Volkswagen will sell three powertrain outputs, starting with a rear-wheel-drive motor generating 140 kilowatts. A dual-motor all-wheel-drive configuration produces 220 kilowatts, which equates to 299 horsepower. That top-tier powertrain can tow up to 2,000 kilograms, or roughly 4,400 pounds.

The exterior silhouette is squarer and more upright than the ID.4 egg shape. In spite of the taller nose, the drag coefficient sits at 0.26, aided by active cooling flaps and flush wheel arches. Volkswagen also eliminated most of the cheap unpainted black plastic that wrapped around the rockers of the older electric model.

Inside the cabin, the center touchscreen measures 15 inches and features permanently illuminated temperature sliders beneath the display. An optional display screen sits directly in front of the passenger seat. For the digital driver display, Volkswagen added a graphic setting that replicates the green back-lit analog dials of a fourth-generation Golf. It looks neat on a showroom floor, though a retro graphic will not fix your day if the underlying software crashes.

Volkswagen is abandoning the GTX trim badge for its performance models. The company will sell the dual-motor ID. Tiguan under the established R-Line moniker instead. That aligns the electric trim hierarchy directly with Volkswagen’s gas-fed performance packages.

Automobilwoche, a German automotive trade weekly based in Munich, reported that the ID. Tiguan will be built at the Emden plant in Germany. Dealerships will sell electric, gasoline, and plug-in hybrid Tiguan models under the same roof. The company is spreading its risk across multiple drivetrains instead of banking exclusively on battery electric sales.

If you build an automobile that makes standard chores like rolling down a window or locking a door feel like an ordeal, customers will simply buy from a competitor. Volkswagen spent six years and billions of euros discovering that drivers want straightforward machinery that works. Putting the Tiguan name on an honest electric crossover with real buttons is the first sensible move Wolfsburg has made in years.