Initially scheduled for the middle of this year, the eighth generation Volkswagen Golf saw its presentation and its launch postponed to 2020. Now, it seems that the “gestation” problems that affected the new Golf have also reached the new generation of the SEAT Leon , which, by all indications, will only arrive next year.
According to official Volkswagen sources, the reason behind the delayed arrival of the eighth generation Golf is simple: strategy. According to Juergen Stackman, responsible for sales and marketing for the brand, “It's better to launch the new Golf early next year (…) It has nothing to do with production. It's a sales decision".
However, there have been several pieces of information that have associated the delay in the presentation and entry into production of the new Golf to some of the technology that it will integrate, especially regarding the high digitization that we will see in the eighth generation of the Golf, which has been causing bugs.
Speaking to Automotive News, Stackman ended up referring that the biggest difficulties that engineers have been facing are related to the ability of the new Volkswagen Golf to see its updated software via air (OTA, or over the air), a solution that we can find in Tesla's models.
Software updates over the air make a car no longer “a closed ecosystem”, says Stackman, which also makes it more vulnerable to computer attacks, raising many challenges in terms of security and even model approval.
And SEAT Leon, when will it arrive?
Taking into account that the SEAT Leon is being developed based on the same evolution of the MQB platform used by the new Golf, everything indicates that the Spanish model will see its arrival on the market delayed. Expected to arrive at the end of 2019, the most likely is that the fourth generation of the Leon will only arrive in 2020.
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Speaking to Autopista, a SEAT official said: “The timing of launching the new generation of models with the MQB platform is in line with the usual rules and the date for starting production has not yet been defined. The goal is for the production of the new models to start between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020″.