Rumor Confirmed: VW GTI Cabrio Coming to Geneva

At the beginning of the month, we posted a story about the possibility of Volkswagen bringing a GTI Cabrio to the Geneva Motor Show. Now Volkswagen has confirmed that the car is real; it is not a concept, and it will be in Switzerland. 

The GTI Cabrio remains similar to the standard GTI. The car uses an insulated, electrically-powered fabric roof that folds away in 9.5 seconds at up to 30km/h (18mph). It has a honeycomb grill with red GTI trim and vertically-mounted fog lights. It comes with smoked LED tail lights and standard 17in wheels. There is automatically deploying rollover protection mounted in the rear seat rests that deploy when the vehicle senses a rollover

Inside, the car uses the classic GTI plaid tartan for the seats with optional leather. The steering wheel, handbrake and gear lever gaiter are all leather with red stitching. 

The GTI Cabrio takes the 2.0 TFSI engine from the standard GTI with 210ps and 208Nm of torque and either a six-speed manual transmission of six-speed DSG. The drop top is slightly slower than the hatchback. It accelerates to 100km/h in 7.3 seconds, versus 6.9 seconds for the hatch and a top speed of 237km/h (147mph), compared to 240km/h (149mph) from the hatch. Volkswagen rates its fuel economy at 7.6l/100km (7.7l/100km for the DSG) and 177g/km of CO2 (180g/km of CO2 for the DSG)

For better handling performance, the GTI Cabrio comes standard with VW's EDS electronic differential and XDS differential lock. 

The car will go on sale in the second half of this year in the UK and Europe. According to Volkswagen PR, there is no plan to bring the car to the US.