Volkswagen confirms more CKD models coming to local market
Paul Tan, 3 Jun '24
During the media drive event of the new Volkswagen Touareg earlier this week, Volkswagen Passenger Cars Malaysia (VPCM) held a Q&A session in which senior officials fielded questions related to the car and the company.
In particular, its managing director Denyu Bostandzhiev shared some interesting details regarding the future of the brand.
When asked by media sources whether there will be any new models priced below the MYR 200,000 (US$ 42,400) mark aside from the Tiguan Allspace (which starts at MYR 164,190). Bostandzhiev said: “There will be a car in this price range, I cannot tell you now when exactly, but I’d say quite soon.”
Denyu further indicated VPCM's desire to reintroduce a regular (non-GTI or R) Golf sometime in the future. "We can assure you that something is happening with the Golf. Everybody's waiting for the normal Golf. We're working on it. We'd like to have the full range of the Golf. We have been owning the segment and we will own the segment in the future as well, it belongs to us," he said.
The current Mk8 Golf was launched here in standard CKD R-Line guise back in July 2022 - after a protracted wait for its price to be approved - but was pulled from sale after less than a year. Media sources presume that it was taken out due to slow sales, likely due to its high MYR 170,560 price and its lack of driver assistance kit.
Bostandzhiev confirmed that "there will be another new model to help offset the cost of localising the CKD Touareg. The car is being locally assembled in Pekan, Pahang, the first time this is happening outside of VW's Bratislava plant in Slovakia."
The company is only targeting to capture a 10% share of the already tiny premium executive SUV market in Malaysia - a segment dominated by the also-CKD BMW X5 and Mercedes-Benz GLE. The Touareg is based on the MLB Evo platform not shared with other Volkswagen brand models.
"We need to share technologies, share investments. I'm not allowed to tell you, but something is cooking. There will be a different model that will appear," said Denyu.
