How Many Golf R Wagons Could Volkswagen USA Sell?

The R version of Volkswagen’s Golf isn’t the kind of car Volkswagen intends to sell in large numbers. The most recent iteration found 3894 U.S. owners in 2012, equal to 19.3% of the 20,208 fast Golf buyers, if “fast Golf” means GTI and R.

In 2013, as the Golf R’s availability inventory dried up, the Golf R attracted 1598 U.S. buyers, or 10.7% of the GTI/R total.

In the meantime, Volkswagen sold 23,946 Jetta SportWagens in 2012 and another 22,534 in 2013, years in which, respectively, VW USA sold 40,885 and 30,931 total Golfs. The Jetta SportWagen, you may recall, was and is a Golf wagon underneath. It has even been marketed in Canada that way. But, thought VW USA, the greater popularity of the Jetta nameplate in the United States meant marketing the car under that banner was more lucrative.

As VeeDub fans the world over have already noted, Volkswagen is showcasing the Golf R Wagon at the auto show in Los Angeles this week. It is the dream car for automotive writers: a relatively affordable and rather quick all-wheel-drive German wagon. It’s blue, yes, but they could paint it a lovely shade of brown, right?

Let’s say, for the sake of your dreams tonight, that this car actually ends up in America as a production car marketed and stocked by Volkswagen dealers. How many could we reasonably expect to see?

We’ll use 2012 as our representative year. Volkswagen sold 64,831 Golf-family vehicles, Jetta SportWagen included. Of those, 37% were wagons and 6% were Golf R hatchbacks. 9.5% of the Golf hatchbacks sold were Golf Rs.

Now we have to make assumptions, and the first will be that there are fewer Golf wagon buyers than Golf hatchback buyers who would be willing to upgrade to the R model. But we won’t drive the number down too far, as a high percentage of the wagon buyers which still exist in the U.S. are willing to shell out on higher-priced machines. (It’s not like there are a bevy of affordable true wagon options.)

Over the last three months, with the new Mk7 Golf activated, Volkswagen USA has averaged 3787 total Golf hatchback sales per month. We’ll add the average for the Jetta SportWagen from the same period last year – 2059/month, when it wasn’t at the end of its tenure – to that total for projected monthly output of 5846 units.

This assumes that Volkswagen’s previously held belief that the wagon would do better under the Jetta banner than the Golf’s won’t hold true. We’ll adjust for seasonal differences and call it 65,000 Golf sales per year, with the wagon generating 35% of that total (22,750) and the Golf R accounting for 7.5% of the wagon’s total, down from the 9.5% achieved by the Golf R hatch in 2012.

Our end tally: 1706 Golf R Wagon sales per year in the United States.

It’s a guess, an educated guess perhaps, but not a prophecy that I’ll firmly stand by. History has been our only guide. It’s certainly not a forecast since, after all, Volkswagen will use their discretion to decide how many, if any, Golf Rs can be sold as wagons in wagon-averse America. But a second-generation Tiguan with 296 horsepower? Yeah, they could probably do just fine with one of those.

For the record, 1700 annual U.S. sales is equal to approximately 0.5% of Volkswagen’s anticipated 2014 volume; and about the level of sales achieved in the last ten months by cars like the BMW Z4, Mini Paceman, and Volvo S80.

And what are its chances for landing stateside? Automotive News quoted a VW spokesman who said Volkswagen has no plans to sell the wagon variant in the U.S. Volkswagen’s own press release on the matter clearly spells out: “Car goes on sale in Europe in Spring of 2015.” Thus, the car’s production debut in Los Angeles may just be a strange form of teasing. Automakers, provoke not your prospective buyers to resentment.

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures.