It’s official! VW finally confirms new (small) bakkie
It’s no longer just a rumour: Volkswagen has confirmed plans to build a new (small) bakkie in Brazil. Could this be the unibody pick-up pencilled in for SA production, too?
Volkswagen has announced a fresh R$3-billion (R9.9-billion) investment into its São José dos Pinhais factory in Brazil, finally confirming plans to build a “new pick-up” at the facility. Yes, this is surely the German firm’s long-rumoured new (small) bakkie.
The plant currently produces the T-Cross, while this latest investment will see the Virtus (or what we know as the Polo Sedan) added to the assembly line from 2025, with the new “unprecedented pick-up” (for the “Brazilian market and export”) set to follow at a later stage.
Why is this potentially relevant to us here in South Africa? Well, in April 2024, the German automaker announced a R4-billion investment in its Kariega facility in the Eastern Cape, which is scheduled to start producing a new small SUV from 2027. This as-yet-unrevealed model will ride on the same MQB-A0 platform as the Polo, T-Cross and other small VWs.
A year earlier, Martina Biene, chairperson and managing director of Volkswagen Group SA (now VW Group Africa), revealed to Cars.co.za that “there is hope” for a Kariega-built half-tonne bakkie spun off this new mystery SUV. Considering Biene also told us the upcoming small SUV “is kind of in partnership with Brazil”, there’s a strong chance that the new pick-up now confirmed for Brazil is also the small bakkie that VW hopes to produce in Kariega.
Though the Wolfsburg-based automaker’s latest announcement from Brazil revealed no details of the new (surely unibody) bakkie, earlier reports suggested it would use a double-cab body style and resemble the Tarok concept revealed at the São Paulo International Motor Show way back in 2018. Biene, meanwhile, earlier hinted to us that it would be a “bigger than half-tonne” model with a 750 kg payload.
We expect the new sub-Amarok bakkie – which a February 2024 report claimed would wear the “Udara” badge, though we suspect the since-uncovered “Taroko” nameplate would be a better fit – to be a little larger than the long-in-the-tooth Saveiro, a likewise unibody model that has never been on the table for South Africa as it’s produced exclusively in left-hand-drive form.
Indeed, Biene earlier told us numerous feasibility studies on a possible local introduction of the Saveiro had been conducted over the years, but each one indicated that converting the Latin America-only bakkie to right-hand-drive would be a prohibitively expensive exercise.
“We’ve done multiple calculations [in an attempt] to get the current Saveiro converted to right-hand drive. Unfortunately, the downside of our Brazilian partnership is that all these [Latin American] countries are left-hand-drive countries,” she explained. The answer, then, would be to build a small bakkie at Kariega instead.
It’s worth noting that VW has offered a small bakkie in SA before in the form of the Mk1 Golf-based Caddy, which traced its origins all the way back to 1978. Volkswagen’s facility in Kariega (earlier named Uitenhage) produced this model from 1981 until 2007.
In addition, the German firm currently has an SA-built bakkie in its range, since the 2nd-generation Amarok is manufactured by Ford alongside the Ranger at the Blue Oval brand’s Silverton factory.
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