Volkswagen mulling hotter Polos for India

Volkswagen is looking at getting some of its sportier hatchbacks to India. It is doing this in an effort to help connect the brand better with car enthusiasts. While earlier there was talk of importing the Golf GT, now VW is also looking further down the price band at sportier derivatives of the Polo.  Part of this is because the current version of the Polo GT has done so well, confounding the expectations of the company. And the Polo will be a car VW will carry on producing in India, future generations included.

As ever, there’s a choice with VW. It can either choose to import the new 150bhp Polo GT or go the whole hog and bring the seriously quick 189bhp Polo GTI. The new GTI is really quick too. Going from 0-100 takes just 6.7 seconds, and the car is likely to get adaptive dampers. As it happens, both engines have currently been homologated for sale in India on other products from the group. The 1.4 TSi used on the new GT currently also powers the base Skoda Octavia, and a slightly de-tuned version of the 1.8 TSi can be found under the hood of the larger 1.8 Octavia too.

While it is clear that both these cars would be great brand builders for Volkswagen and the Polo sub-brand, neither is likely to be cheap. The new Polo GTI, for example, even if partly assembled here, would cost upwards of Rs 17 lakh, and that for a car the size of a Swift would be a hard sell.