Volkswagen Amarok W580 bids farewell with SE variant

The final Volkswagen Amarok W580 has rolled off the production line at Walkinshaw’s Clayton facility, calling time on the locally-enhanced model’s 20-month production run and the first-generation Amarok’s 11-year lifespan.

To bid farewell to the model, 99 examples of the 2022 Volkswagen Amarok W580SE have been produced, priced from $86,990 plus on-road costs.

Based on the touring-focused W580S variant, the Amarok W580SE includes the 75-watt LED light bar from the W580X and exclusively adds a spray-in tub liner and Nappa leather seats with Walkinshaw branding on the head restraints.

In all, 2600 Amarok W580 utes have been produced between March 2021 and November 2022, the production run split as follows:

Volkswagen Australia Commercial Vehicles Director, Ryan Davies, told carsales the number could’ve been higher were it not for production constraints.

“During the last couple of years, I think we were our own worst enemy in many ways, not being able to secure as much production early enough, so we could’ve easily done more, I would think,” he said.

Nevertheless, both parties are happy with the results of a program that was deemed a step into the unknown from its outset.

“We knew Amarok was definitely going to be untouched by the factory for the last two years of its life,” explained Davies. “So if we wanted to keep it appealing to the Australian public we knew we had to do something.

“When you speak to your dealer network about something and you think you might be potentially off with the fairies with a concept and that dealer network is behind you, you know you’ve got something pretty special.

“We gave them an allocation, they wanted more, but the validation really came when we sold out in seconds with those first batch of cars.

“When we sold the first batch of cars online, we oversold them by almost double, so we knew that it was going to be successful from day one [and] we started talking about ramping up the volume even harder.”

Walkinshaw Group CEO, Ryan Walkinshaw, added: “Volkswagen has been really, really good as a partner. They’ve been able to understand the time pressures that we’re under in order to be able to give them the program in the timeframe that we expect.

“We say Walkinshaw Group are really good at doing two things when it comes to a relationship with an OE. We’re good at doing things normally for a lot cheaper than they could do it and we do things a lot faster than they could do it, but if the OE starts to try and pull us too much into their world, all of a sudden our USP really starts being dissolved.

“Sometimes, we’ve had that experience with OE programs, where they’ve tried to integrate us too much and then it doesn’t work, the economics don’t make sense. Volkswagen and the team over here have been really, really understanding which is really important.”

Despite the success of the first-generation Volkswagen Amarok W580 program, a successor based on the all-new Ford Ranger-based Amarok, due in Australia from April 2023, is yet to be confirmed.

However, Davies has told carsales previously that VW “would be mad not to” offer a locally-enhanced version of its new dual-cab.

“We think there’s room in the market for a Walkinshaw-type vehicle for the new Amarok generation and we’re definitely going to try and capitalise on that,” he said.

While a new Walkinshaw Amarok is unlikely to appear before 2025, the program arriving at the start of the new model’s lifecycle, rather than in the final two years as with the current vehicle, means more options are on the table.

“The opportunity on new Amarok is massive because obviously the payback time is a long longer,” Davies told carsales previously.

“With the payback period being long that means you can investigate maybe different things that potentially we may not have been able to investigate with the current one.”

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