A new SUV, slotted beneath the Tiguan, is coming to the US in 2019, Volkswagen has confirmed. With two new SUVs—the Atlas and the new Tiguan—both also headed Stateside, VW is making good on its promise to fill out its SUV offerings.
First shown in Geneva way back in 2014, the T-Roc is a small, roughly Golf-sized crossover that’s based on the MQB platform and is set to come with optional 4Motion.
If a potent little AWD crossover sounds like it’s up your alley, thank VW’s US dealers. The company’s 650 retail partners went to bat for it, convinced that sales of the T-Roc would be matched only by sales of hot cakes.
“Everybody loves T-Roc, everybody,” Alan Brown, VW’s former dealer chairman, told Automotive News. “The only concern is whether it’s going to be priced outside of the market, where it wouldn’t do the volume that it deserves to do.”
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That fear was only recently assuaged. “It was only yesterday that we decided on an additional SUV [for the US market in] for 2019,” Herbert Diess told reporters in Wolfsburg last week.
Where the T-Roc will be built remains to be seen. Mexico’s Puebla plant already makes the Tiguan, while Chattanooga is now set up for MQB production, but VW may prefer to keep production in Portugal. So too does it remain to be seen what the crossover will be named once it hits American dealerships.
For Europeans, meanwhile, the T-Roc is set to debut in August 2017 with a range of little engines and the eventual possibility of a hybrid drivetrain.
[source: Automotive News]
