Volkswagen takes the fight to Tesla with its best EV yet

Oh, and the touch-sensitive sliders used to adjust the volume and climate controls off-screen are now illuminated – as they should have been from the start. Volkswagen has also taken a leaf out of Skoda’s book and added a proper always-on climate control bar along the lower edge of the screen, with most of the climate control functions available to press without having to fumble your way out of the menu you were using. 

Volkswagen is also keen to point out that it’s incorporating artificial intelligence into the car’s voice recognition system, cutely named Ida, though this will come later in the year and be retrofitted to existing ID.7s via an over-the-air update. 

The idea is that you bypass the touchscreen altogether by asking your car to make it warmer or cooler, turn things on or off, take you to your destination, open the blind to the (optional) panoramic glass roof, and so on.

This is great in theory. In practice, however, the voice recognition system itself is far too sensitive. You’re supposed to activate it by saying “Hey Ida”, but it seems to hear this in whatever you might be saying to your passenger all too regularly, so that it frequently jumps into your conversation with an “I didn’t understand that”. 

On one mildly entertaining occasion during my drive, it activated itself and simply displayed the word “Dover” on the screen for about a minute. Nope, us neither. 

Quality control

The quality of the ID.7’s interior feels right, though. All the bits you touch with any regularity are trimmed in dense, soft-touch plastics or a squishy material that does a good impression of leather, while the doors feel so heavy and solid they might as well be fashioned from ingots. 

You can select from 30 colours of ambient lighting and every version gets a crystal-clear head-up display – which, by the way, is supposed to be the main source of vehicle information; the small, slit-like instrument binnacle below is intended to serve only as a back-up. Happily, this bit of the ID.7 works well.