The Golf R and Golf GTI will still be in the air after this year, but you can say goodbye to the base Golf, which is leaving the American market forever. Or at least until gasoline prices soar and Americans want good, small, fuel-efficient cars again.
We saw this coming in 2019, when VW killed Alltrack and SportWagen here, and then e-Golf too. First of all we had a tip that basic golf would also be dead at some point.
That day has come.
Herndon, VA – Volkswagen of America today announced that the critically acclaimed Volkswagen Golf ended production for the U.S. market last week. Volkswagen expects the 2021 Golf models built at the Puebla plant in Mexico to sustain sales of the affordable European design hatchback until the end of the year. The name of the Golf family will continue in the model year 2022 with the introduction of the new Mk 8 Golf GTI and Golf R, arriving this fall.
Golf has been sold here since 1974; back then it was called a rabbit here and started at $ 2,995; the manual version in 2021 starts at $ 23,195. VW launched an eighth generation Golf in 2019, but we still have the seventh generation Golf here in the USA, where things will also end.
Golf competes with cars like the Honda Civic and the Mazda 3, and sales here last year were really good, all things considered, with VW selling 6,063, or 7.4 percent more than in 2019. That’s crumbs for a carmaker as big as Volkswagen, however, and I’m sure the internal justification here is something like this: Of course, sales increased by one little, but we don’t make as much money from each one anyway, or at least not as much as we did when we sold a Tiguan.
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It can also be a nod to the coming of ID.4 to the United States, although to be honest Volkswagen’s strategy in the USA confused me for a while now. That’s because there just doesn’t seem to be one, although the pandemic has also affected things, as it has done with everyone else. Get your base Golf while supplies last.