Volkswagen reveals detailed plans for 2019

The electrification of the world’s biggest car-maker will start in earnest next year, with Volkswagen planning to add four all-electric cars to its line-up in 2019.

In a conference in Wolfsburg yesterday, Volkswagen’s board member for sales Jürgen Stackmann insisted that launching both the eighth-generation Golf and the I.D. Neo battery-electric vehicle (BEV) would boost the brand like never before.

Volkswagen's redesigned Mk8 Golf will hit Australian showrooms in 2020 and the revolutionary new I.D. Neo will arrive here in 2021.

It won’t just be the Volkswagen brand hitting the fast-chargers next year, though, with the Porsche Taycan and Audi e-tron and e-tron GT rolling out next year, with other pure BEV cars planned for both brands, plus Seat, Skoda and Bentley.

“The Golf will be followed by the I.D., marking the start of a new era for Volkswagen,” Stackmann said.

“The I.D. will be the first fully-connected, fully-electric car and will be a symbol of the New Volkswagen.

“They [the Golf and the I.D. Neo] are some of the key product highlights in the coming year,” Stackmann said, with Volkswagen pushing EV product out to be ready for the looming 2020 EU7 emissions laws.

The I.D. Neo will also usher in the era of online car buying to the German brand, still reeling from its Dieselgate scandal and its failure to deliver WLTP emissions-test compliant cars from September onwards this year.

"We will be debuting pre-booking for the I.D., marking the beginning of e-commerce for us,” he explained.

It is also in the process of converting its Emden, Zwickau and Hannover plants in Germany over from internal-combustion to EV production, creating Europe’s largest EV production network.

The 2019 rollout plan also includes models already known to be coming, like the T-Cross compact crossover, based on the Polo’s architecture, and the T-Roc Cabrio.

Four of the new models will be for China only, which confirms the importance of the world’s biggest car market to Volkswagen’s fortunes. Volkswagen is the biggest-selling brand in China, via its joint-venture operations with BAIC based in Beijing and SAIC in the southern city of Shanghai.

The China-only cars include the introduction of the Polo there, though it has been on sale in Europe since earlier this year, plus electric versions of the Golf, the Bora and the Lavida sedan. The Bora and the Lavida are consistently worth around 700,000 cars a year for Volkswagen.

It will also receive a long-wheelbase version of the T-Cross, which it will be built in both China and Brazil.

There will also be facelifted Passat models for the US (which has a unique, cheaper version of the Passat) and the rest of the world, with the Mk8 Golf and the I.D. Neo arriving late in the year.

In another shock, though, Volkswagen’s Chief Operating Officer has confirmed it will only offer manual-transmission versions for all of its future “entry-level motorisations”, forcing customers to go upstream within the model ranges for automatic gear-shifting or even all-wheel drive.

It’s a move that will kill off about 25 per cent of Volkswagen’s powertrain variants by 2022, which will also help it to comply with the difficult WLTP emissions tests.

With diesel engine sales slumping everywhere in Europe except Italy, Volkswagen has been forced to massively ramp up its new relatively new, high-tech 1.5-litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol engines.

The brand says diesel’s collapse forced it to more than double production of the 1.5-litre TSI-Evo motor, rising from 500,000 a year to 1.5 million, with Volkswagen Chief Operating Officer Ralf Brandstaetter admitting its “supply chain buckled under the weight” of the increased production.

It’s chasing a massive reduction in design, engineering and manufacturing complexity, bumping up the penetration of its MQB modular platform architecture from 60 per cent today to about 80 per cent.

Stackmann also confirmed that it was closing in on its target of six per cent profit margin sooner than it expected, and expected to reach it in 2022, three years earlier than planned.

In reaction to Dieselgate, the company has been in a cost-cutting frenzy, slashing €3 billion from its annual costs, helping it to the six per cent profit target.