It’s probably down to cost too. VWoA’s head of product line for Golf had to personally fight tooth and nail with the Germans to give them a ‘stick’ because so many ‘enthusiasts’ in the US love manuals and it makes up a high degree of R sales. VW now sees the US market as more ‘emotional’ (that’s the Wolfsburg term for it, not mine) and so their model line up is less geared towards volume, hence why they send the Golf 8 there in GTI/R form only. The Jetta does boggo Golf’s job there.
VW gave us (and Europe) the manual option on mk7, and just like the 3 door body-style, nobody bought it. I’ve never seen how a manual (over DSG) suits the character of a 4pot 300ps 4WD daily driver like a Golf R anyway. It ain’t exactly a Cayman GT4. VW knew that nobody would buy the manual mk7 R because they never bothered to engineer a compatible clutch for the 300ps/4wd combo; they just gave it the one from the GTI 230 in and thus they all melted after 10,000 miles. They’ll have almost certainly done the same on the Golf 8 in the US so I don’t think we’re missing much!
I do hear the argument for a manual GTI Clubsport though, and it is a shame that we don’t get that. Would have been interested to see overall manual/DSG sales figures for all iterations of mk7/7.5 GTI/Clubsport. Obviously they’d made their mind up by the TCR so is probably quite conclusive.
