This is the Volkswagen Amarok SUV, a sibling to the Ford Everest 4WD that's yet to become a production model

Volkswagen’s Amarok being twinned - underneath at least - with the Ford Ranger opens the door to another potential model for Volkswagen, but even though the brand never built an SUV cousin to the Ford Everest, VW’s design team explored the idea.

Albert Kirzinger, Head of Design at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, posted a single image of a design concept to the corporate networking platform known as LinkedIn, depicting a digital image of an Amarok SUV.

With a conceptual version of the current Amarok’s design language featuring a sleek light bar and more rugged trim, the SUV concept was part of the “research phase”, according to Kirzinger.

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“Exploring design ideas for the Amarok pickup truck!” Kirzinger’s post begins, “our research phase back in the day took us on an off-road journey, and here's a sneak peek with a rendering featuring a fully closed pickup bed.”

When asked in a comment on the post whether this is a hint that there is indeed a Volkwagen version of the Ford Everest on the way, Kirzinger replied “sorry - but no further hint”.

Volkswagen sold 6626 Amaroks in 2023 and 4514 in 2022.

While the Amarok is, according to 2023’s sales figures, Volkswagen’s second-most popular model in Australia behind the Tiguan, an SUV version of the model may not have garnered the same success.

Just as a quick estimation based on Ford’s Ranger and Everest, the popularity of the ute compared to the three-row SUV is about 4.2 times as much, with the models having racked up a little over 63,000 and 15,100 sales respectively.

Volkswagen sold 6626 Amaroks in 2023 and 4514 in 2022, and it’s not certain an SUV version of the model would sell well without eating into the brand’s lower-selling Touareg large SUV, a facelift of which is due in the coming months.