From the 2002 R32 right up until today, VW has always featured its highest-performance Golf variants in a characteristic shade of blue.
Volkswagen
Hot-hatch fans rejoice: The reveal of the next-generation Volkswagen Golf R is nearly upon us. Set to be built on the bones of the already-revealed eighth-generation Golf, the new all-wheel-drive model sounds like it may put some distance on the company’s latest GTI (seen below), too. The 2022 Golf R — set to be introduced in a characteristic shade of blue, if the above teaser photo is anything to go by — will be revealed on Wednesday, Nov. 4.
In a teaser announcement released Friday, VW touts the new Mk8 as the most powerful Golf ever, additionally revealing that the car will feature “wheel-selective torque control on the rear axle” as part of a new or updated AWD system. As expected, a version of the company’s EA888 2.0-liter turbo four will be found under the hood, with VW pointing out that the massaged engine features a water-cooled exhaust gas duct for the turbo built right into the cylinder head.
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If this new model is to be the most powerful Golf ever, that means it will need to outpoint the 2019 Golf R’s 288 horsepower and potentially its 280 pound-feet of torque, as well. (The model is on hiatus in North America while VW readies the new one.) Rumors have the new model putting out well over 300 horsepower — potentially around 315.
It’ll be particularly interesting to see if Wolfsburg also manages to preserve offering both a dual-clutch automatic gearbox and a traditional row-your-own manual gearbox offering for North America. Despite the DSG’s quicker shifts, past Golf R generations have enjoyed abnormally high stick-shift take rates, so there’s good reason to hope that VW will continue to make such a transmission available in the US and Canada, even as three-pedal setups continue to lose traction in the wider marketplace. (We know from spy shots that such a gearbox is in development, at least for other markets.)
The new Golf R is expected to hit European dealers shortly after the reveal announcement, but we’re expecting a significantly longer wait to get one in the US and Canada — especially if the GTI’s already-promised on-sale time frame of Q4 2021 is anything to go on.
Historically, there’s been a temporal gap between the availability of the GTI and the hotter Golf R, so the fact that both models will be shown well in advance of their NA on-sale dates has us wondering if VW will bring them both to market in quicker succession this time, or maybe even simultaneously. Back in May, when VW first detailed the 2022 GTI, Megan Closset, product manager for the Golf family, told Roadshow, “Right now, it’s a little bit up in the air, as far as does Golf R come first, or does GTI then come, but I can confidently tell you that these will both be model year ’22, and they will come very close to one another.”
