The Cheapest Volkswagen ID.3 Shines in Bjørn Nyland’s 1000 km Challenge

 It costs less than $32,000, at least in Norway.

   For those who have n’t heard of him yet, Bjørn Nyland is a Norwegian YouTuber known, among other effects, for his “ 1000 km challenge”. He tests electric vehicles, measuring how long it takes them to cover 1000 km ( more or less 620 country miles), start-to- finish. No electric auto presently available can complete that distance on a single charge, not at trace pets. So the total time includes the time spent charging at intermediate stops — and indeed a auto with a decent each-electric range will get penalized if it charges too sluggishly. That happed to the 62-kWh Nissan Leaf and to the Renault Zoe both of them demanded further than 14 hours. 

 

 Again, a auto with a fairly small battery but a high charging speed (as measured in kilowatts) would fare nicely well in this kind of test. The thing is, it’s hard to find any auto fitting this description besides the old, long-discontinued 28-kWh Hyundai Ioniq (which completed Nyland’s 1000 km challenge in about 12 hours). 

 Now, it looks like the old Ioniq’s design gospel was revivified in the form of the cheapest, 45-kWh Volkwagen ID.3, with its small but quick- charging battery. 

 

 The ID.3 comes in three battery sizes, with 77 kWh, 58 kWh or 45 kWh of net capacity. I assume the variant driven by Bjørn in the test was the Pure Performance, as it's the only 45-kWh variant presently showing on the Norwegian price list. It costs an fellow of slightly lower than USD, or EUR; electric buses are principally untaxed in Norway. 

 In his test, Bjørn took advantage of the fact that the ID.3, like utmost electric buses, charges briskly when the state-of- charge is low, and avoided charging it to much further than 60 — so the average distance between charging stops was relatively short. And let’s make one thing clear with its limited range, this auto makes sense if you live nearly where DC dishes are available, well, everyplace — like in Norway or, to a large degree, Germany. Or if you do n’t drive long distances atall.However, driving such a auto is hassle-free, If there's always a DC bowl hard. But trying to cross a home that's only sparsely peopled with DC dishes (like large swathes of theU.S. Midwest) in this auto could be a agony. 

 

 11 hours 5 twinkles. This is how important time the cheapest ID.3 demanded to complete the 1000 km challenge. There were some buses that achieved better results in Bjørn’s tests, sure, but all of them were more precious. 

 As an exercise in making electric buses affordable, and still useful on really long passages, the cheapest ID.3 can be considered a success. That being said, electric buses remain much more precious than they should be.

 At least at the time of purchase. One of the other buses tested was an early- product Tesla Model S, which surely did bring further than the ID.3 when it was a brand new auto.