Hence my surprise to even see it for sale in Brazil and the reason I brought it up. After looking at their lineup, it seem like VW has moved away from their historical approach of providing cheaper, older vehicles in the Brazilian market.
I think most of the established brands have stopped doing a lot of that, but it used to be very common. VW would build some models in Germany for several years, mostly for sale to higher priced markets; when it came time for a new model, the old production tooling would go to South Africa, Mexico, or Brazil where it would continue to be built (and refined) for many more years. It's great for parts availability too, and sometimes there's nice improvements available with parts that were designed after the model left my market.
But now it's more common to have completely different models for lower priced markets, or build a global model with different options in different markets. Soemthing, something, model consolidation is expected to reduce costs? But BYD (and others) are making big inroads into low cost markets by building models that are more affordable and using that volume to maybe move into higher priced markets over time.