The Volkswagen ID.7 Tourer Is A Passat Estate For The Electric Age

Right now, if you want an electric estate car, your choices are limited to some small B-segment based offerings from MG, Peugeot and Vauxhall, or the rather impractical £87,000 Porsche Taycan Sport Turismo. In this nascent market segment, there hasn’t been much to fill that rather sizeable gulf. Until now.

This is the new Volkswagen ID.7 Tourer, and it’s an estate version of the ID.7 saloon. That’s about all there is to say about it.

Oh, you want more? Okay then. We first saw this car previewed back in 2019 with the ID Space Vizzion concept, and the finished article has survived the transition from show car to production vehicle pretty well. Like the saloon (and, in fact, every other EV Volkswagen sells), it’s based on the scalable MEB platform.

Full powertrain details are unconfirmed, but they’ll almost certainly echo the ID.7 saloon’s options – a 77kWh battery in Pro grade, and 85kWh for the Pro S, with a 282bhp motor. Volkswagen claims the longest-range versions will achieve up to 426 miles on a charge, getting close to the 430 miles of the (not yet available in the UK) Pro S saloon. Expect both single-motor rear-wheel drive and dual-motor all-wheel drive versions.

Boot space is improved over the saloon, because that’s how estate cars work (except, somehow, for the Alfa Romeo 156). With the rear seats up, capacity is 605 litres, and with them folded flat, that increases to 1714 litres – up from 532 and 1586 in the saloon, respectively.

All new for the Tourer is an on-board ‘Wellness’ app, with which occupants can select from three preconfigured programmes – Fresh Up, Calm Down and Power Break – that alter various vehicle functions (we presume this means things like ambient lighting and displays). Otherwise, the cockpit looks identical to the saloon.

Pricing or availability isn’t yet confirmed, but expect the former to increase from the saloon’s £51,550 by a couple of grand.

We drove the ID.7 saloon recently, and found it made significant progress over VW’s first few cracks at EVs, mainly by improving on the poor materials and infuriating interfaces found inside IDs 3 to 5. On looks and concept alone, we like the Tourer even more. It’s refreshing to have an estate that’s not trying to be something else: not a jacked-up, faux-rugged lifestyle crossover or a swoopy, four-door mangling of the shooting brake concept, but a handsome, practical, old-fashioned estate car. Just one that happens to be electric.