Volkswagen South Africa says as many as 40 000 units of the Golf 7 have been sold locally since the model’s launch in 2013, with every third example wearing the GTI badge.

Speaking during a livestream covering the reveal of the new Golf 8 GTI GTC race car, Martina Biene, who heads up the Volkswagen brand in South Africa, shared some interesting numbers.

“We have sold 40 000 units [of the Golf 7 that touched down in February 2013] in total, out of which 33 percent were GTIs.

“So, every third Golf was a GTI and that makes us one of the top ten markets in terms of GTI globally,” she revealed.

Whip out your calculator and you’ll see that means around 13 200 examples of the seventh-generation Golf GTI have been registered in South Africa since that generation of the hot hatch launched locally in July 2013, before being updated in May 2017.

Of course, that figure will grow a bit more, since the Golf 7 range (including the GTI as well as 300 units of the GTI TCR) will remain available in South Africa until the arrival of the eighth-generation Golf in early 2021. The Golf 8 line-up is expected to launch with the new GTI, which will offer 180 kW from its turbocharged 2,0-litre, four-cylinder heart.

Original article from Car