Looking back at the history of Volkswagen, the Beetle may have been the most iconic small passenger car that the German brand ever produced, but the Golf certainly takes second place.
But as the world moves to cleaner motoring, and governments tighten the rules around internal combustion engines, brands are being forced to make tough decisions, and the Golf looks to be on the chopping block.
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This revelation comes from a recent conference call, where VW's board rep for sales and marketing Jürgen Stackmann told reporters that the Golf will "probably not" live alongside the fully-electric ID range in the future.
"I am convinced that you will see Golf nine coming," said Stackmann. "I think Golf will have a lot of interesting technologies until the boundary of full-electric. The fully electric ID goes into the ID family and that decision is of a divide within the family. [sic] So for full electric, we want to have optimized platforms doing just electric and they will be called ID for the future."
Understandably, Volkswagen isn't going to bring back the fully-electric E-Golf in this eight-generation, as the focus of electric motoring is to be put on the highly-anticipated ID.3 hatch.
"Golf will remain as a strong effort of the brand in many places [sic], and I believe in Europe as well, but in many places outside Europe where they probably don't have the capacity to go full electric so fast," added Stackmann. "So I'm convinced that we will see a parallel run of Golf nine and ID [in the] next generation."
"What technology Golf nine will bring we will see. It will again be leading-edge as we are now seeing with Golf eight—whenever we come with next-generation Golf it will be a mark for the rest of the industry to beat for the next five or six years to come."