A wild rumor shocked wagon enthusiasts around the world back in September 2018 when a report alleged Volkswagen wouldn't launch a long-roof version of its Golf Mk8. We didn't believe it back then, but we had to wait roughly a year for the Wolfsburg-based company to announce there would be a new Golf Variant. Fast forward to May 15, 2020 – here it is. Well, most of it anyway.
For the first time, Germany's take on the Skoda Octavia Combi (you can actually see a second-gen model in some of the photos) has been caught with very little camouflage. As a matter of fact, we're only seeing it on the taillights where there are stickers featuring a design copied from the previous-generation Golf wagon. There could be some deceiving white tape on the tailgate and black camo near the D-pillars, but those areas can't be hiding anything important.
Not that VW actually needed to camouflage the prototype because we all know how the Golf Variant is going to look. The company's best-selling car has never taken any design risks, and that's especially true when morphing from a hatchback to a wagon. The upcoming family friendly derivative was spotted right behind the new hatch, and you can easily see the cars are pretty much identical up until the B-pillar.
A new Golf Variant quite possibly means an Alltrack is planned, but neither of the two will be sold in North America. VW has clearly said the SportWagen and its rugged counterpart won't return for the Golf's eighth generation in the U.S. Europeans with an appetite for fast wagons are keeping their fingers crossed for another Golf R Variant and possibly a new Golf GTD Variant as well. A plug-in hybrid GTE would also make sense on the Old Continent where there's still strong demand for wagons.
VW will introduce the wagon sometime this fall, possibly in October. It will debut after the two hot hatches the company hasn't revealed yet, the GTI TCR and the flagship R, both expected to premiere in the following months.
