The future of the compact class

The future of the compact class

The Volkswagen Group with its various brands is committed to fully electric drives. The Volkswagen brand alone plans to bring eleven new electric vehicles onto the market by 2027, VW brand board member Thomas Schäfer recently said at a press conference in Salzburg. According to Schäfer, in order to achieve a lasting breakthrough in the transformation process away from diesel and gasoline engines towards electromobility, electricity prices must also be discussed in Europe. In China, almost everyone drives electric because electricity is extremely cheap there. However, it will only be possible to make e-mobility widespread if cheaper electric cars come onto the market. Therefore, the Volkswagen CEO announced the ID study. 2all is offering a fully electric VW, which will be available for less than 25,000 euros from 2025. With this and other innovations from other Volkswagen Group brands, Europe's leading car manufacturer wants to stand up to the competition from China in terms of price. “Volkswagen has the advantage of size,” says Schäfer and at the same time does not rule out collaboration with other manufacturers, for example in the development of battery cells. 

When the first Golf went into series production in the spring of 1974, many car experts shook their heads and simply said that Volkswagen was doing everything wrong with the Golf that could possibly be done wrong. A car with a square body, a water-cooled instead of air-cooled engine that is installed at the front rather than the rear, and with front-wheel drive instead of rear-wheel drive is supposed to overtake the rounded Beetle, the most successful Volkswagen of all time? Today there are 37 million VW Golfs compared to a total of 21.5 million Beetles built worldwide by 2003. To mark the 50th birthday of the Golf, Volkswagen is presenting the further development of the eighth model generation of the compact car from Wolfsburg. This also marks the start of a new era of electrification for the Golf class: for the first time, the VW Golf is available with plug-in hybrid technology, which enables a purely electric range of up to 140 kilometers.

Given the ongoing transformation process from classic combustion engines to electric drives, does a car model that was born half a century ago have any future at all? According to the EU's plans, new combustion engines that run on diesel or gasoline will no longer be permitted in Europe from 2035. The exemption of cars that run exclusively on e-fuels is currently still being discussed. The general rule is that new cars may only be operated CO2-free from the reference year. Thomas Schäfer therefore sees no end to the Golf: "Based on the future 'Scalable Systems Platform', the next model generation of the VW Golf will be available with a purely electric drive from 20230." But Volkswagen doesn't have the all-electric ID. 3 model series created competition for a future electric Golf in-house? According to the company's management, with the unmistakable Golf design, the Golf proportions and the usual Golf utility value, the future electrified generation of the compact classic should also be able to remain independent and coexist.

With this clear commitment to the further development of the Golf series, the stock of the successful compact model will continue to grow in this country and worldwide. "Since the world premiere in 1974, around 950,000 Golfs have been registered in Austria. Of these, one in three are still driving and the Golf is therefore No. 1 in the car charts," says Porsche Austria Managing Director Wilfried Weitgasser, explaining the market importance of the Golf. There are currently almost 340,000 VW Golfs registered for use, which corresponds to around 6.5 percent of the domestic vehicle population and almost 30 percent of all Volkswagens driving on Austria's roads. Thomas Herndl, Volkswagen Brand Manager Austria, addresses the "democratization function" for modern vehicle technology of the VW Golf across eight model generations: "With safety features such as ABS, ESP, airbags and all-wheel drive, the Golf was a technology leader in the compact car class from the start. The Golf Country, produced in the early 1990s, can be seen as an SUV pioneer." (A. Tempelmayr)