Volkswagen wants higher sales volumes in North America and so far, that’s proving to be a tough brass ring to pull down. Alone the Golf isn’t enough to fix that, but it will play a key role in making it possible.
If you’ve been watching the automotive media over the last year, there’s a good chance you know that the seventh generation Golf and its derivatives aren’t really new. In fact, it’s been about a year since they arrived in showrooms overseas.
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Car nerddom comes with a status card and there’s a test prerequisite to holding one. On filled copies of that scroll, you’ll find a few things: tears drawn from years of loneliness, a smudge or two of soiled motor oil and probably some scrawling about the structures that underpin the cars being marketed at this housewife or that hedge fund manger. You see, it’s what’s inside that counts.
In Volkswagen’s case, the guts are really interesting. Currently, its models are in the midst of an exodus to the “MQB” platform. That stands for something in German, but it translates to “modular transverse matrix” in English. It’s the structure that will underpin a long list of models from Volkswagen Group that includes the new Golf.
For Volkswagen, MQB boils down to parts sharing and the economies of scale and that should matter you. Not because someone in Germany is saving money, but because the Golf costs less in its seventh generation. Furthermore, Volkswagen added content for the 2015 model year that, it says, represents an even more substantial discount over the outgoing model. Truth be told, Volkswagen’s discount claims amount to questionable marketing shenanigans from a pure price perspective, but the point is that VW is upping the bang-for-your-buck factor this time around.