Volkswagen's High-Performance R Brand Cars Will All Be Electric by 2030

Volkswagen says its performance R sub-brand will be an EV-only lineup by decade’s end, according to a report in the U.K.’s Autocar.The transition is planned to occur gradually, and on a new EV platform, with several unnamed electric R models in planning already, VW reportedly said.Volkswagen as a whole is targeting 2035 to be a fully electric brand.

Volkswagen, like so many other manufacturers, bound by regulations, and driven by an arms race of sorts, promised future electrification across the brand. For Volkswagen, that date is 2035, the year that sales of new gasoline- and diesel-powered vehices will become outlawed throughout the EU. Unfortunately, that also includes Volkswagen’s R performance sub-brand. The company confirmed in a recent interview with Autocar that the R performance brand will make that switch a full five years before the rest of the brand—in 2030.

The only R brand model currently on sale in the United States is the Golf R, although vehicles including the Tiguan R and Arteon R are sold in Europe. Volkswagen confirmed to U.K. publication Autocar that the company is currently in the planning stages for multiple electric R models. “One thing is certain: the future of R is electric,” a company spokesperson is quoted as saying. VW also said future electric R models will receive trickle-down technology much like their internal-combustion counterparts. We hope that means seeing performance figures anywhere in the same universe as the prototype I.D. R, which set a Nürburgring EV record in 2019.

Volkswagen

“In order to become a fully electric brand by the end of the decade, we’re already taking the necessary steps today for the forthcoming transformation,” VW’s Reinhold Ivenz told Autocar. According to this story, future R models will be built on a version of the Volkswagen Group’s Scalable Systems Platform (SSP), which is the company’s EV platform set to succeed the current MEB platform in 2026. What does that mean for the current Golf R? It indicates that it’s unlikely the Golf R as we know and love it will make a direct transition to an electric vehicle, and the same goes for R versions of any vehicles that are going to be sold as ICE in the shorter term. However, VW does say it has “several” of the new R models in the works, so we can likely expect to start seeing those before too long.

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