Wolfsburg’s flagship SUV will end production next year but will remain on sale in South Africa till at least 2027.
Volkswagen has cited platform costs as one of the reasons for the Touareg’s departure in 2026 after 24 years.
Name will continue as an EV
Back in August, unnamed sources confided to Britain’s Autocar that the second model after the ill-fated Phaeton to spearhead Volkswagen’s move towards becoming a premium brand would cease production, with no direct replacement being planned.
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Earlier this month, though, Germany’s Automobilwoche alleged that the Touareg would be reimagined as an EV under the ID range of models.
Still to be produced at the Bratislava plant in Slovakia, the ID. Touareg, according to the publication, will become the first model to use the all-new SSP or Scalable System Platform as a successor to the current MLB Evo.
Too expensive
A platform that also underpins the Porsche Cayenne, Audi Q7 and Q8, Bentley Bentayga and Lamborghini Urus, its usage for the Touareg has now been deemed unattainable cost-wise.
“The Touareg has the unfortunate thing of being the only [Volkswagen] on its platform. Of course, the Cayenne is on the same platform, but volume-wise, it is just way too expensive to maintain an extra platform and an extra electronic architecture for a very small amount of cars,” Volkswagen South Africa Managing Director, Martina Biene, said on the sidelines of the Tayron’s local market launch last month.
“In terms of how we try to scale globally, it was a case of, “well, good that we got it”, but it wasn’t cheap from an investment perspective. Low volume, single platform is the main reason for its discontinuing”.
South Africa will have it a bit longer
On sale in its current third-generation guise since 2018, the Touareg, which received what is likely to be its one and only mid-life update two years ago, is, however, expected to remain present in South Africa for a while longer than in Europe as production winds down.
As such, it will only be discontinued in 2027, a year after the Old Continent, and two years before the supposed arrival of the ID. Touareg.
It will, therefore, leave the Tiguan-derived Tayron as Wolfsburg’s flagship combustion engine for the foreseeable future in Europe, South Africa and Australia, but not North America, where the left-hand drive-only Atlas has been its range-topper since replacing the Touareg in 2017.
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