Extensive changes seek to address the widespread criticisms of usability and quality
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Volkswagen is “just a few weeks away” from unwrapping the long-awaited ‘Mk8.5’ Golf hatchback, which promises high-profile usability improvements, upgraded powertrains and a host of new technology.
Previewed with a camouflaged prototype – in hot GTI guise – at CES in Las Vegas, the updated Golf will be available for pre-order in the spring, around four years after the current car arrived in dealerships.
Importantly, 2024 also marks 50 years since the Golf replaced the Beetle as Volkswagen’s core model. Since then, more than 37 million examples have been sold globally, making it comfortably the 86-year-old company’s – and Europe’s – best-selling car of all time.
This latest iteration, while not radically different in its overall design, is charged with renewing and sustaining the appeal of the eighth-generation Golf until it is replaced by the electric-only Mk9 at the end of the decade.
Chief among the upgrades for 2024 will be a revised interior, which majors on improvements to ergonomics, quality and functionality – areas in which VW has admitted its current cars fall short. Volkswagen CEO Thomas Schäfer told Autocar last year that widespread criticism of the interiors of its current cars – including the Golf – “definitely did a lot of damage” to the brand, which the firm is looking to rectify with a new approach to cockpit design.
To that end, the new Golf features a redesigned dashboard, which now houses a larger, 12.9in central infotainment display, working in tandem with a 10.4in digital instrument cluster and running the latest generation of VW’s MIB infotainment platform.
The new MIB system, first introduced on the ID 3 and ID 7 EVs, brings improved menu structures, faster processing speeds and higher-resolution displays in response to criticisms that the outgoing system was slow to wake up and difficult to use on the move.
Volkswagen’s quest for greater usability also means the Golf’s much-derided haptic steering wheel controls have been swapped for more traditional physical buttons – an arrangement that is visually familiar from the previous, seventh-generation Golf, often regarded as a high point in the model line’s history.
The new Golf will seek to re-establish its reputation for quality construction with an array of more upmarket materials throughout the interior, includ
