• Plenty of passenger space
• Room for up to seven passengers
• Enormous boot, but not the most flexile

How much space is there?

Plenty. The Buzz’s high roof and a broad cabin means there’s loads of space inside for passengers. There’s enough room to walk between the two front seats – and if you go for a six-seat model, you can stroll all the way from the front to the rear of the vehicle.

You access the rear seats through a pair of sliding doors (electrically operated on all but the entry-level Life trim), which are great for managing kids in tight car parks. Space in the back is great, too, with plenty of head and legroom, even if you’re relegated to the rearmost chairs in the seven-seat model. It’s one of few cars we’ve tested that can genuinely seat seven adults in comfort – even for those in the third row.

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But the seats aren’t particularly clever, which is a shame. The bench in the five-seat model only tilts forward with a 60:40 split, and you only get two Isofix points on the outer seats. The middle seat is firmer and narrower than those either side of it, too, meaning three chunky travel seats are completely out of the question.

Boot space and storage

The Buzz is basically a big box, so it stands to reason that it should offer plenty of space for your luggage. And it does. The five-seat, standard-wheelbase model has 1,211 litres of boot space with the rear seats in place. That’s almost as much as space as the Volkswagen ID.3 has with all its seats folded down!

Fold the Buzz’s rear bench flat and storage space swells to a whopping 2,205 litres. That’s around a third more than the 1,575 litres you get in the ID.4. Accessing that space isn’t as convenient as it sounds, though – you need to move the front seats forward to give the rear seat backs enough room to fold flat. That’s not ideal for tall drivers.

Then there’s the matter of the huge difference in height between the rear seat backs and the Buzz’s floor. Handily, Volkswagen’s ‘multi-flex board’ (included in the firm’s optional Comfort Package Plus) adds a shelf that eliminates the drop. Removing it entirely, however, is quite a faff as you can’t just take out straight away, instead you have to unscrew two bolts to do so. It becomes a bit of a pain if you vary between having the seats up all the time and having them folded.

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You also get storage boxes that slide underneath the shelf, but your outright boot capacity falls and you need to deal with a raised loading height. Our advice? Try before you buy. The standard setup might be fine for your needs, especially if you don’t need to regularly carry bulky items.

The seven-seat models have less boot space. They might be longer than the standard Buzz, but that extra space is swallowed up by the rear seats – so much so, that all you’re left with is a shelf behind the tailgate that’s only just big enough for a rucksack and a pair of carry-on cases. There’s also a significant gap between the second and third row of seats when folded, meaning items can quite easily get lost between them.

Is it easy to park?

The Buzz was deliberately designed to have a lower roofline than the old Caravelle and the new Multivan. It’s to make it more compatible with multi storey car parks. It’s still a large vehicle, though, and we found it was quite neat fit in an average parking space. At least you can have it with parking sensors and a rear-view camera.

If you’d rather not worry about parking, you get Park Assist Plus as standard. This allows you to teach the Buzz up to five 50m parking manoeuvres, which it can then repeat. The sliding rear doors are also handy for loading passengers, but we found we couldn’t open the huge tailgate in tight car parks with low rooves.

Safety

• Five-star Euro NCAP rating
• Lots of modern safety tech
• Car2X and a centre airbag

The ID. Buzz is part of Volkswagen’s latest cohort of electric cars, which means it’s loaded with the same level of safety tech you get on the ID.4 and ID.5. This includes autonomous emergency braking (which can detect pedestrians and cyclists as well as cars), lane-keeping assist and Volkswagen’s fancy Car2X system.

This networks the vehicle to various sources of information about the road network (which includes other Volkswagen vehicles) to give you warnings about hazards ahead. Like most new cars, it can also alert the emergency services in the event of a crash, read road signs and help you take evasive action if the need arises.

Euro NCAP gave the ID. Buzz a five-star safety rating when it was tested in 2022. The testers were particularly impressed by how well the MPV shielded its adult occupants in its impact tests – especially the side impact test, in which the central airbag supported the driver well. Plus, both the six- and 10-year-old child dummies emerged from their wreckages completely unscathed.

Watch the Euro NCAP crash test video