- Volkswagen announced it would discontinue the SportWagen and Alltrack by the end of 2019.
- The U.S. models are currently built in Puebla, Mexico alongside the current Golf and Jetta.
- Volkswagen plans several crossovers, as the market continues to boom.
Another victim of the crossover craze.
Volkswagen is seeing green, but I’m not talking about electric cars. At least not yet — it will be a couple years before we see the upcoming ID. series. No, I’m talking about crossovers, and the company’s decision to kill off the Golf SportWagen and Alltrack models at the end of 2019. As Volkswagen prepares to launch more crossovers in the coming years, lower demand models like these are being shown the door.
It’s not entirely unexpected. While the SportWagen and Alltrack comprised the best-selling models in the Golf range, they still lagged far behind the Tiguan and Atlas. So far this year, Volkswagen has managed to shift around 75,000 crossovers. The wagon count? Just 8,000 units.
Competition isn’t helping, either. Wagons are a rare breed, but that doesn’t mean Volkswagen had smooth sailing with these two. Instead, it had to climb the mountain that is Subaru with the Outback — a car that outsells the Golf SportWagen and Alltrack over ten-to-one. Particularly as Subaru is about to launch the revised 2020 Outback, they pretty much have this segment on lock. In a more competitive marketplace, there’s more room for Volkswagen to chip away at several automakers’ sales, rather than take Subaru head on.
There’s a new Golf generation coming
Finally, there’s the matter of the eighth-generation Golf. We in the U.S. face a problem with the new model, since we aren’t getting the standard model in the U.S. The Golf is another glacial seller in Volkswagen’s U.S. lineup these days, so we’re just getting the new GTI and Golf R. Rather than update the SportWagen and Alltrack, it makes more sense for Volkswagen to discontinue the models. That will push buyers into the Tiguan, the upcoming Atlas Cross Sport, or the Tarek. The Tarek is a sub-Tiguan crossover slated to hit our shores in 2021.
Eventually, we’ll see the ID. series in the U.S. as — you guessed it — a crossover. Namely, the ID. Crozz.
Check out the Alltrack versus the fifth-generation Subaru Outback below:
