Sketchy Stuff: VW Shows Images of Mk8 Golf

The Volkswagen Golf has been a mainstay on the compact car scene since approximately the dawn of time, ringing up sales on multiple continents and introducing a world of new drivers to the sweet taste of freedom. They say if you line up all the Golfs ever produced, you’d create a line of cars from here to Deep Space Nine, or something like that.

Later this month, a new version will appear in Wolfsburg. Set to be the models’ eighth generation, it’ll cut a new shape while still being immediately recognizable as a Golf. Today, Volkswagen released a few sketches of the new car for the world to peruse.

There’s little doubt the car you’re looking at is a Golf, shaped as it is with a truncated roofline and bulbous snout. A fast and sharp character line creases the metal just below its beltline, a styling flourish your author hopes will make it to production. Those headlights and badge placement evoke the design language currently in use on the Arteon coupe/sedan thing.

One item that surely won’t make it to production are those enormous wheels, a set of bling that looks great in sketches and on the show floor but are generally cut by flinty-eyed accountants in the real world. Expect the nubbin of black ahead of the front doors to stick around, though, as it is a family styling feature currently cropping up on just about everything with a VW badge. The rear spoiler, sticking out like a spoilt child’s bottom lip, will stay on certain trims as well.

Unsurprisingly, the interior render shows what appears to be an infotainment screen standing at attention atop the dashboard. There also seems to be some sort of auxiliary screen or bank of buttons to the gauge pod’s immediate left. In what is surely an illusion of optics, the gearshift lever seems to have moved off the floor and is now protruding from the centre stack, not unlike that on an old Alfa Romeo Spider.

No official word exists on the planned appearance of GTI or R models, variants that will surely follow in due process to maintain customer interest over the life cycle of the car. Speaking of the GTI, your author was interested to learn that if you enjoy the GTI’s plaid seats and golf ball shifter knob (as I do), then we have a person named Gunhild Liljequist to thank.