Auf wiedersehen to the gas-burning VW Golf

The gasoline-burning Volkswagen Golf will turn 50 next year. It won’t make it to 60.

The erstwhile Golf with its internal combustion motor — once a Rabbit in the States, a Caribe in Mexico — may carry almost as much historical baggage as the car it replaced, the Beetle. There’s powerful equity in all those names. But if the Golf is to foster a life beyond the end of its current lifecycle — around 2030 — it will require some automotive magic … and certainly a battery.

The current eighth-generation Golf is expected to undergo a facelift next year, a revision “that puts it in a great position until the end of the decade. Then we will have to see how the segment develops,” VW brand boss Thomas Schaefer told Automotive News Europe sister publication Automobilwoche.

By 2028 at the earliest, Schaefer said, the ninth-generation Golf will be all electric and will arrive when VW disengages from the current MEB platform and launches its new SSP electric platform. “If the world develops completely differently than expected by 2026 or 2027, then we can also launch a completely new vehicle again. But I don’t expect that to happen. So far, that’s not planned,” he said.

“It’s clear that we will not be giving up iconic names like Golf, Tiguan and GTI, but will be transferring them to the electric world,” Schaefer said. “But with the Golf in particular, it has to fit the genes. Just calling any vehicle that doesn’t work. We won’t make that mistake.”

In the grand Germanic scheme of things, all VWs will run all-electric within ten years from now. As far as projecting the name game by then, Schaefer told Autocar that there’s a good enough connection between Volkswagen and the ID name to keep it around even alongside more traditional names. If one reads between the lines, don’t be surprised if at some point the car’s called the “ID.Golf.”

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