Next Generation VW Golf Preview.

VW released a teaser image for the next-generation Golf a while ago. Today we have these 2 illustrations from Europe, trying to guess what the real thing will look like.

The next VW Golf will of course try tolook a bit sleeker and more aerodynamic than the current model. But it will probably be yet another very conservative evolution. Trying again to recapture the magic of the first generation Giugiaro design. Something VW has never been able to do in all these years. Now it might look like a cross between the new ID.Polo and the current Golf…

Future VW EVs will carry familiar names with “ID” added, rather than standing apart as a separate family. BMW is doing something similar, sticking with the model names (in their case, numbers) everyone already knows and simply adding an “i” to denote electric versions. That menas what we are looking at here would be the ID.Golf.

For Volkswagen, keeping the Golf name alive through the EV transition also helps maintain brand continuity in a rapidly changing market. The Golf has been one of Europe’s best-selling cars for many decades, and abandoning that name for a new electric sub-brand could have risked losing the model’s enormous recognition and loyalty.

This strategy will probably work for a while. Eventually, though, if EVs do replace all new models, these extra letters—“i,” “ID,” or “Electric”—will become redundant. At that point, they’ll quietly disappear. Electric will no longer need explaining, and the cars will simply go back to being what they always were: Golf, 3 Series, C-Class. No prefixes, no suffixes, just names.

We’ll see…