Volkswagen confirms 8th-gen Golf GTI will debut in Geneva
The GTI will make its way to the US, as will the R, but that's not guaranteed for lesser Golf models.
We've known for a while that a new Volkswagen GTI was coming, but the folks in Wolfsburg had left things somewhat vague when it came to the timeline for its debut. The best we could get out of them was "2020."
We thought that might mean late 2020, but it looks like that won't be the case since Volkswagen said to Autocar on Thursday that the car would be making its official debut at the Geneva Motor Show in March. Asked for comment by Roadshow, Volkswagen confirmed it.
The GTI and its bigger brother, the Golf R -- which is set to debut this spring at Goodwood -- are likely to be the only Golf models we're going to get in the US as the brand moves away from sedans, wagons and hatchbacks and toward crossovers and SUVs. Still, it's hard to complain about us getting the GTI, right?
Beyond the debut date and its confirmation for the US, we don't know much about the Mk. 8 GTI except that it will have a 2.0-liter engine and in its most potent (read: Golf R) trim will make 296 horsepower. We'd bet that the GTI will sit somewhere around 230 hp to 240 hp -- the 2019 model made 228 hp.
We can assume a few other things about it with reasonable amounts of certainty, like that it will probably be offered with both a dual-clutch transmission and a six-speed manual and it'll likely hover in the $25,000 to $30,000 range. It is a GTI, after all.
