I just returned our hire ID.3 to Pulman Volkswagen in Durham after 7 days of a mixed road trip and week off. I’m a long time Volkswagen driver having started with a diesel Passat and then a few VW Golfs when our kids grew up and we didn’t need as large a car.

I currently drive a VW Golf Mk7.5 and although I’ve sat in the ID.3 and ID.4 in our local VW Dealer showroom, really wanted to have a drive. When I saw the awesome hire rates from VW Financial Services Rent-A-Car I got in touch with the nearest VW Finance Car Hire centre with the ID.3 and booked it for 7 days. This was still cheaper than the weekend rate on the Tesla Model S of a few years ago; apparently the rates are set centrally by VW Finance Rental in an attempt to encourage purchase.

We hired the ID.3 Family but unfortunately this had a technical fault on the day we were due to pick up the car so fortunately I was still able to get a 204PS ID.3 for the week but in a lower trim (Life).

I’m going to write some more detailed posts as I gather my thoughts but in summary it was a seamless hire experience:

• Big thanks to Shahkiel Akbar (Group rental manager) for a smooth and efficient hire process, and for his first hand experience of running an ID.3 as his daily drive.
• Thanks for handing the car over with 100% charge (you can see the bank of chargers Pulman have in their forecourt) and for explaining that the car didn’t need to be charged before return.
• Thanks again for including a Type 2 cable with the car (Enterprise omitted this with the Tesla Model S) and I consistently saw 11kW when using AC chargers.
• I was able to use the VW ID app on my Android Phone which allowed me to monitor the charge status of the car when AC charging.
• The car was Manganese Grey Metallic which is the colour I always pick when playing with the car configurator on the Volkswagen Website.

In summary the car was very good and felt like our car after a few days, I found a good driving position immediately and it just worked as a car.