[joao balao]

Hi all, I've owned a 21 FE which I traded in for a 23 AWD Pro S when we moved to rural northern NY. I have snow tires. I know the Id4 quirks well, and have been mostly happy with my car. Because of my experience this weekend, I'm not going anywhere remote, at least not on snow or gravel, where the traction/AWD systems could go haywire. Sorry, its a long one.

My wife and I went out on a plowed forest service road for a hike. As we approached the trail, I started getting lots of error messages (frankly, I'm used to that in ID4), but the car still drove and didn't behave strangely.

I parked, and then decided to repark, but the car wouldn't move. About every 5 attempts of getting out, and sitting back in, the car might move a few inches, then die. We figured out that reverse seemed to have more luck, but not much. We did not have reception and we felt panicked and stranded.

I walked 2 miles to get reception, called VW customer care and they called a tow truck. The guy showed up 2 hours later and said 'he didn't trust his chains' to get him on the road, which again, we easily drove on before breaking down. We had our dogs, and there wasn't enough room for all of us in the cab. He gave my wife a ride home, and she was going to come back with our Tiguan. I painfully joked that I might use it to tow the Id4 out. When they got home, he told her that since VW wouldn't reimburse him because he didn't tow us, we owed him $100. Not VWs fault, but come on!

Meanwhile, back at the trail, I had time to kill so I walked back to the ID4. About 4 hours had passed since breakdown. For kicks, I put my dog in the car, put it in reverse and it started up. I drove home. All the error messages had gone away.

We were not in deep snow, and any AWD could have easily handled this. I have a dealer appointment tomorrow, and VW customer care called me today to check in. To his credit, the VW care guy sounded shocked and promised to stay in touch.

My only takeaway thought is that if I had a wrench, maybe I could have been able to disconnect the battery to reset it? But seriously, this was not OK.

1) ESC (electronic stability control) error. Did not get a pic of that one, but also tried disabling/modifying ESC in settings, but it was frozen.
2) Error: Drive System: hadn't seen this one before. I did once get the electrical system not functioning on my '21, not sure if this is an updated message for '23.
3) All Wheel drive system is limited. Please modify your driving style. This felt especially like a punch to gut. Like, I bought an AWD for snow traction.
4) And a TPMS error, for good measure I guess ?

 

[joao balao]

Really scary situation. By the way, did you try to turn ESC off? I was playing with pull down menu on my 23 Pro AWD and there is a shortcut which says ESC OFF. I added it as shortcut there but never had a chance to test it and hope I will never need it as well.

I did suspect that ESC might be playing a part, but unfortunately the ESC menu setting was disabled while the errors were going. I did not know about a pull down option, though as you said I hopefully won't be able to confirm it's emergency use. Good to know and I'll add it as a shortcut just in case!

 

[joao balao]

Just wrapping up my service appointment. Dealer says they found a lot of faults, but no hard faults that require service. I've asked that they open a ticket to VW for some additional consultation with an engineer. I actually had about 40k of pain free miles on my FE driving though Buffalo/ Western NY winters, aside from the common infotainment issues. I've driven my '23 a ton in the snow, often through the Adirondacks, and it handled admirably. Just disconcerting that now some combination of faults happened that led it to essentially shut down it's drive system, and they can't explain why. I'm not eager to go out and buy a Tesla - or any other EV - as a replacement. Thinking of going Luddite and getting an old stick shift AWD or 4wd. Maybe Something dumb with knobs for controls, and a mechanical shifter to put it into neutral, lol.