Volkswagen’s Mk9 Golf has long been expected to go electric-only, and is set to be built at the Wolfsburg factory, VW’s home base.
This was due to occur shortly after production of the petrol and diesel-powered Mk8.5 Golf moved to Mexico in 2027, allowing the hatchback to remain on sale in markets not showing demand for EVs.
However, as reported by Bloomberg, Volkswagen is now expected to delay the launch of the electric Golf, with insider sources saying the retooling of the Wolfsburg plant has stalled due to budget constraints.
According to Bloomberg’s sources, this has delayed the movement of production of the internal combustion engined Golf from Wolfsburg to Mexico.
It won’t be the first time Germany’s iconic Golf has been made elsewhere: the Puebla factory produced the Mk7 for North America, while South Africa was once a hub for the model, and exported certain variants to Australia.
The decision to move production from Germany to Mexico came last year amid major cost-cutting measures for Volkswagen, which targeted medium-tern cost savings of €15 billion (A$26 billion) annually from a variety of measures. The factory relocation alone was expected to account for €4 billion (A$7 billion) of that figure.
Previous reports have suggested the electric Golf Mk9 would launch in 2028 or 2029, though Bloomberg now claims the 2029 figure is more likely, leaving Volkswagen exposed for a longer time period to the increasing number of Chinese rivals in its key markets.
Both the electric Golf and another, to-be-announced model will be built on the Wolfsburg production lines and underpinned by the upcoming Scalable Systems Platform (SSP), the Volkswagen Group’s next-generation EV architecture.
Off the back of revealing the pre-production ID. Polo last week, Volkswagen announced its future EVs will adopt a more conventional naming structure, with the electric Golf expected to be sold as the ID. Golf.
