Golf R and Golf GTI will still be available later this year, but you can say goodbye to the base Gulf, which is leaving the US market for good. Or at least until gas prices rise and Americans want good, small, low-fuel cars again.
I saw this coming in 2019, when VW killed Alltrack and SportWagen here, and later e-Golf. First of all, we he had a hint that the base bay would have died at some point.
That day has come.
Herndon, VA – Volkswagen of America announced today that the famous Volkswagen Golf ended production for the American market last week. Volkswagen expects the Golf 2021 model built at the plant in Puebla, Mexico, to support the sale of the hatchback at affordable prices, designed in Europe, by 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, which will arrive this fall.
The bay has been sold here since 1974; at that time it was called Rabbit here and started at $ 2,995; the manual version in 2021 starts at $ 23,195. VW has introduced an eighth generation Golf in 2019, but we are still receiving the seventh generation Golf here in the US, which means that things will end.
Golf competes with cars like the Honda Civic and Mazda 3, and sales here last year were actually pretty good, considering everything, with VW the sale 6,063, or 7.4 percent more than in 2019. However, it’s a crumb for a carmaker as big as Volkswagen, and I’m sure the internal justification here is something like: Sure, sales have gone up a little bit, but not anyway. You don’t make that much money on each, or at least not as much as we do when we sell a Tiguan.
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It could also be a nod to ID.4 coming to the states, though, frankly, the US Volkswagen strategy I’ve been confused for a while now. That’s because there doesn’t seem to be one, although the pandemic has thrown a key into things, as it has done for everyone else. Get your basic Gulf until stocks run out.