Hecho en Mexico: Volkswagen Shifting Golf Production to Puebla

It seems as Wolfsburg preps itself for the impending all-electric ID.Golf, the gasoline-powered variant will shift its production home to Mexico – potentially by the 2027 calendar year.

This nugget of information comes courtesy of our eagle-eyed friends at  Autoguide who spotted an otherwise throwaway line in a broader report from Autocar across the pond. That article was mainly talking about the next-gen hatchback and its designs on being all-electric. According to those in the know, the so-called ID.Golf (unclear if the full stop will be in its official name but we’re including it here) will be the ninth-generation car while the gasser will remain in the style of the existing eighth-gen machine.

Volkswagen’s plant in Puebla has been cranking out vehicles for six decades, opening in 1964 and currently listed as the largest VW facility in that country. The place presently cranks out the Jetta, Tiguan LWB, and tongue-twisting Taos. In the past, it was responsible for the markedly long-lived original Beetle, Combi van, and New Beetle – amongst others. Golf hatchbacks and wagons have been built there in the past and shipped to certain markets, but this plan would see the first time all gasoline-powered Golfs have been built outside Germany.

The upcoming fully electric Golf is set to be assembled on the brand’s Scalable Systems Platform (SSP), meaning there’s every chance in the world it will eventually be hammered together alongside other models bound for that platform. Use of the SSP is expected to commence near the end of this decade and should succeed the MEB and PPE platforms.

Last year, VW America sold a total of nearly a quarter million vehicles across the Jetta/Tiguan/Taos model lines. Given the sheer volume of rigs cranked out by the Puebla facility over the last 61 years, there’s a solid chance you have either owned one, know someone who has, or at least been a passenger in a Mexican-produced VW. 

We would be remiss not to mention tariffs in any article about vehicles being built in other countries (thanks, Google SEO) but the timelines on this production shift are such that it is difficult to estimate any impact such trade policies will have on this decision, especially since information from the White House on that topic seems to change almost hourly; who knows what the landscape will look like three or four years from now.

[Images: Volkswagen]

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