... Eh? The first eGolf (ignoring weirdo historical electric Golf variants; VW has occasionally dabbled since the 70s) was delivered a year before the first Tesla S, though for a pilot scheme in California; they didn't hit normal retail til a year or so after. The eUp came out in the same timeframe. Commercial deliveries of Tesla Ses, eUps, and eGolfs all started within a couple of months of each other. By the time Tesla got around to launching an electric car that didn't cost like 100,000 EUR, VW had been making such cars for years.
I think VW maybe made a marketing mistake by making the eGolf and eUp so... non-obvious (there was really almost no way to tell they weren't a normal Golf/Up from the outside); it lead people to believe that the ID.3/4/5 were their first electric cars.