Electric Car Awards 2023: Best used electric family car

The name ‘Golf’ has become as synonymous with family cars as Hoover has with vacuum cleaners and Tannoy with public address systems. The ID 3 – the electric successor to Volkswagen’s Golf – is charged with doing the same in a post-petrol world. And while its name might not yet slip from your tongue like ‘Golf’ does, the Volkswagen ID 3 does a good job of following in that car’s footsteps.

Looks-wise, it successfully straddles the line between overtly futuristic and entirely conventional in a way that the buyer looking for an updated Golf might be entirely comfortable with. In short, if you want a new Golf but you want it to be electric, this is it.

It turns out it has all the familiar abilities of a Golf, too. It’s good to drive, with peppy performance, and the interior is large enough for family use without the car feeling overly large in the supermarket car park. Only slightly disappointing interior quality and a fiddly infotainment system – both issues partly redressed this year – let it down in our eyes.

Battery sizes range from 45kWh to 77kWh, with the smallest good for an official range of more than 200 miles and the largest up to 340 miles. Somewhere in the middle lies the 58kWh version with an official range of 260 miles, and this is the one that looks the best value when bought used. Shop around and you should be able to get one for around £19,000; that’s a very useful saving on the price of a new one.

And that financial advantage makes the ID 3 really compelling. In a burgeoning electric family car class, unless you go for an older Hyundai Ioniq, Nissan Leaf or the older and less capable e-Golf (offered from 2014-2020), you’ll not find anything quite as affordable. Even the MG 4 hasn’t been out long enough for it to match the ID 3 for value on the used market.

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