Surprise: This Was Germany

• The Volkswagen ID.7 was Germany’s best-selling EV in 2025, followed by four more VW Group EVs.
• Volkswagen dominated its home EV sales charts last year with eight out of the top 10 bestsellers.
• The manufacturer has high hopes that the affordable ID. Polo, launching this year, will become an instant success.

Volkswagen is Europe’s domestic electric-vehicle leader now, with a series of battery-powered models that have proven consistently popular across the continent (and taken advantage of some Elon Musk-related discontent.) The brand is selling very well in its home market of Germany, where EV deliveries rose by 60.7% to 93,800, and the bestselling model wasn’t the brand’s cheapest electric offering.

Surprisingly, it was the brand’s flagship EV, the ID.7 sedan—the electric equivalent of a Passat—that won over German buyers with 35,000 delivered at home, marking a 132% year-over-year increase and outselling the brand’s smaller and cheaper models. Ecomento reveals that the five best-selling EVs in Germany last year were made by the VW Group.

The ID.7 saw similar success across Europe, where EV sales surged in 2025 despite a continent-wide incentive pullback, selling 76,600 units and 133.9% more than in 2024. What makes its success somewhat surprising is that it’s neither a crossover nor particularly affordable.

In Germany, it starts at €54,100 for the fastback and €54,900 for the long-roof wagon. The base model has a single 286-horsepower motor driving the rear wheels and sprints to 62 mph (100 km/h) in 6.5 seconds. The dual-motor GTX starts at €63,265 and delivers 340 hp, reducing acceleration to 5.1 seconds and featuring a slightly larger battery with a usable capacity of 86 kilowatt-hours (up from 77 kWh in the base model).

The pick of the range is the mid-level Pro S model with a single motor and a large battery, which gives it a claimed WLTP range of 440 miles (708 km), making it one of the continent’s longest-range EVs.

It is Germany and Europe’s best-selling electric wagon too, although its popularity will likely be challenged by the arrival of the Zeekr 7GT this summer, which offers more luxury for similar money, it looks better and also charges faster than anything else available on the continent today.

By all accounts, including our own, the ID.7 is a very good car with many strengths. But it operates in a market that’s much friendlier to sedans than the United States is.

Volkswagen planned to bring it to the U.S. in 2024 but changed its mind, citing “the ongoing challenging EV climate” as the reason. What VW didn’t say is that it didn’t have faith the ID.7 would sell in a market that prefers crossovers and no longer has a $7,500 federal tax credit to sweeten the deal. New tariffs on European-made cars likely didn’t help its case, either.

All of Volkswagen’s EV sales in Europe last year added up to 247,900 models sold, thanks to the continued success of the ID.3, ID.4 and ID.5, although Volkswagen expects its new ID. Polo to make quite the splash when it arrives this spring. As its name implies, it is an electric Polo with a €25,000 price tag, but it also includes a lot of what VW has learned making EVs over the last decade, which especially shows inside, where it has more physical controls than any previous ID model.

Europeans have shown interest in buying subcompact electric hatchbacks—the Renault 5 was Europe’s third-best-selling EV for much of last year—and VW wants to tap into that segment with the Polo EV. If that doesn’t live up to the manufacturer’s expectation, it’s also launching a crossover equivalent of the model, which, just like the ID. Polo is moving away from the quirky design of previous ID cars, so it just looks like an electric T-Cross.

Meanwhile, the VW Group’s best-selling EV doesn’t come from Germany. It’s the Elroq made by its Czech subsidiary, Skoda. The Elroq was the continent’s second-best-selling EV in 2025, after the Tesla Model Y (and it even beat the Tesla in October, according to CleanTechnica). Volkswagen doesn’t have an equivalent for the model, which is smaller than an ID.4 but larger than the ID. Cross, and it seems like a missed opportunity not to have an entrant in that size bracket.

The ID. Polo and ID. Cross aren’t the only new additions to VW’s electric lineup this year. The manufacturer will introduce significantly updated versions of the successful ID.3 and ID.4, which will look much more similar to their combustion equivalents, the Golf and the Tiguan. Their interiors are expected to receive a major overhaul too, with VW adding physical controls and finally giving up on the touch-sensitive slides that nobody liked.

This will leave the ID.7 as the last example of the original and slightly left-field vision for ID models in terms of its exterior design and interior functionality. But it’s been on sale since August 2023, so it too will soon receive its mid-lifecycle refresh, which will likely bring a similar set of changes as those expected for the smaller ID cars.

If VW makes it look and feel more like a conventional model, its popularity could only increase.