Volkswagen’s CEO has confirmed that development of the 1st fully electric Golf GTI is well underway, promising that the battery-powered hot hatch will be “a monster”…
Thomas Schäfer, CEO of the Volkswagen brand, has confirmed that development work on the 1st fully electric Golf GTI is well underway, adding that the result will be “a monster car”.
The 55-year-old VW boss – who was chairman and managing director of Volkswagen Group South Africa from 2015 to 2020 – suggested to Auto Express the electric Golf GTI would debut around 2030. While it’s too early to speculate on potential outputs, the planned model’s peak power will surely far eclipse the Golf 8.5 GTI‘s 195 kW (and likely even the Clubsport‘s 221 kW).
“At the end of the decade, we will bring an electric Golf [GTI] and that will be a monster car. I’m very happy with the progress. It’s cool – you can make it exciting; it has to be exciting; it has to be authentic. If we bring a GTI, it has to be a [true] GTI,” Schäfer said, according to the British publication.
Interestingly, as we reported in 2024, the current-generation Golf 8 (presumably including the GTI hot hatch) is expected to gain periodic updates that will allow it to stick around until 2035. That would suggest the new fully electric Golf 9 GTI – which could end up wearing “ID Golf” nameplate – will be sold alongside its predecessor.
“We know what the vehicle looks like and [can] sit virtually in the vehicle. The dimensions of the platform and the vehicle is clear, though it’s not [fine-tuned] to the last design detail. We have many iteration steps to get through,” he added.
According to the Auto Express report, though the upcoming battery-powered Golf GTI will switch to electric oomph and the latest SSP platform, it will retain the front-wheel-drive configuration of its 8 forebears. An all-paw electric Golf R, though, is also seemingly on the cards.
But, as Schäfer points out, the Golf won’t be the 1st VW nameplate to gain an electric GTI derivative. Before that model arrives, the Wolfsburg-based automaker plans to launch a production version of the ID.2 GTI, likely as early as 2026.
“We’ll bring through a whole group of GTI, starting with the ID.2 GTI which is the first one coming electrically. When we started this journey, [we told the] the development teams ‘we’ve got to be proud of the GTI of the future’, and the team’s taking that on,” he said.
Back in November 2022, Schäfer effectively confirmed a Golf 9 was on the cards, saying the German marque “would be crazy” to let “iconic brand names” such as Golf and GTI “die and slip away” as it pivoted towards electric cars. The following year (after the discovery of a revised version of its iconic GTI logo, complete with a lightning bolt), he suggested such a model would indeed be fully electric.
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