Volkswagen ID.4 Motor Teardown: Killed By A Very Simple Problem

The coolant seems to have gone where it wasn’t supposed to. Yet the damaged motor looks pretty much perfect inside.

Failed front drive unit from a Volkswagen ID.4

Photo by: I Do Cars (YouTube)

Iulian Dnistran

By: Iulian Dnistran

Mar 15, 2025 at 10:13am ET

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Teardown video shows a broken Volkswagen ID.4 front drive unit.
A simple sealing ring seems to be the cause of the failure.

Compared to combustion engines, electric drive motors are shockingly simple. Case in point: the front drive unit of the Volkswagen ID.4 and Audi Q4 E-Tron you see in the video embedded below.

It’s a very compact unit that integrates the motor, transmission and inverter. However, there is a problem with this particular one: it’s dead. By the looks of it, a bad sealing ring allowed coolant to go where it wasn’t supposed to go, killing the entire unit.

In the video, YouTuber I Do Cars, who is well-known for taking apart combustion engines, tries his best to take the front drive unit apart to see what went wrong with it. Using just simple tools and a bit of persuasion, the whole thing comes apart over the course of this 34-minute clip.

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Before you jump into the comments to say that this is a rear drive unit, you should know that Volkswagen manufactures the rear drive units in-house, while Magna makes the front drive units in China. And this is a Chinese-made motor, as can be seen in the video.

While the coolant leak is far from obvious, the presenter does mention a couple of times that the transmission fluid had a stinky smell. This could result from coolant leaking into the fluid through a seal.

What’s fascinating about this whole thing is that the damaged motor looks pretty much perfect inside. It's possible that a skilled technician could easily repair it and put it back together in a day. There’s no mechanical damage to any of the components, and the whole thing is less than two years old, so physically it should still be good for many years to come.

There’s a good number of people online complaining about failed front motors on their Volkswagen ID.4 and Audi Q4 E-Tron EVs. Forum posts describe how cars with as little as 6,000 miles went into limp mode and had to be towed to a dealer where technicians replaced the faulty motors with new ones.

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There was even a recall for a small number of 2023 Volkswagen ID.4s in the United States for a leaky front motor seal. This particular unit might be among those affected by the recall, but we have no way of knowing for sure.

In any case, it’s a fascinating video that shows just how simple EV motors are and how easily they can potentially be repaired, thus considerably lowering maintenance costs for owners.

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