Volkswagen Golf to live on as an EV along with the GTI

A new report has confirmed that the Volkswagen Golf will become a fully electric model (EV) when it enters its next model generation.

VW’s head of technical development, Kai Grunitz, told Top Gear that the now 50-year-old nameplate won’t be killed off as it’s the heart of the brand.

“We’ve started to work on a fully electric Golf. We have concrete ideas of how it will look like, but we will see how the market develops,” he said.

If the project goes ahead, that would mean the recently revealed Mk 8.5 Golf the last-ever model to feature an internal combustion engine, along with its sportier GTI variant. There wasn’t any mention of a top-of-the-line R though.

“If we bring an electric vehicle with the name Golf, it has to be a real Golf. It has to look like a Golf. It has to be affordable like a Golf. It has to be like a Golf. And there has to be a GTI,” Grunitz added.

However, the advent of an electric Golf poses a problem for the German carmaker, and that has to do with the ID.3.

Volkswagen of course released the ID.3 in 2020 as the first model in its all-electric ID. series, but if the Golf goes EV, then the brand would have to cull the aforementioned model from the line-up so that it doesn’t cannibalise the market.

Grunitz also mentioned that an electric Golf wouldn’t be based on VW’s MEB architecture, but rather the new Scalable System Platform (SSP). Nothing was said about power figures, electric motors, or battery capacity this early on though.