Among the requirements of Volkswagen’s Dieselgate settlement with the Department of Justice back in 2016 was to start building electric vehicles locally at the company’s factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee. That was a reality by 2021, when we drove our first US-made VW ID.4. Five years later, VW is moving on. After mid-April, no more ID.4s will roll down Chattanooga’s assembly line, which instead will be reconfigured for the brand’s newly revealed gasoline-powered Atlas SUV.
The ID.4 was well-received when it debuted in 2021, and the model had a mostly strong 2025, selling 31 percent more than the year before. But sales of the electric VW collapsed after the Trump administration abolished the clean vehicle tax credit at the end of Q3 2025; the next three months saw ID.4 sales fall by 62 percent year over year.
VW is gambling that Americans will instead want more gas-powered SUVs—probably a decision made before Trump started a war in the Middle East that has increased the price of gasoline by more than a dollar per gallon in the last few weeks. Snark aside, the Atlas is VW’s second-best seller here, and VW wants the second-gen Atlas in dealerships by this fall.
“The Chattanooga plant has been, and will continue to be, a cornerstone of Volkswagen’s strategy in the United States,” said VW Group of America president and CEO Kjell Gruner. “This strategic shift underscores the company’s commitment to Chattanooga and its workforce as we position the plant for long-term success and future product opportunities.”
If you still want an ID.4, VW says it has sufficient inventory at dealers “to support customer demand into 2027,” and the post-refresh models are both more powerful but also more efficient than earlier cars.
But it does leave the prospect of VW not having any electric cars to sell at some point; in December, the company revealed it was selling so few ID.Buzz minivans that it would simply not bother with a model year 2026 at all, ceasing imports. (In retrospect, that really does make this one of the worst headlines of my entire career.)
In this case, VW says “a future version of the ID.4 is currently planned for the North American market; details will be shared at a later time.” If and when that car appears, it may well be rebadged as the ID.Tiguan.
