Hein Schafer, Senior Vice President of Sales at Volkswagen Group USA, shared two images teasing the upcoming 2024 Volkswagen Atlas.

"Super proud to share a first look at the new 2024 Atlas family. A more sophisticated interior, a better powertrain, and lit on the inside and outside," Shafer wrote in a LinkedIn post.

As you can see from the exterior image, the 2024 Atlas will likely stick to the midsize three-row recipe but with some choice updates. We can see an all-new LED headlight design and an LED bar that connects the redesigned headlights. The simple logo badge is also illuminated.

The interior image suggests a move upmarket. We only see a tiny portion of the dashboard with integrated lights. This is likely a more advanced version of your run-of-the-mill ambient interior lighting system. The words "Cross Sport" also appear on the dash, meaning the standard SUV and its coupe brother will be carried over.

CarBuzz spoke to Schafer in July 2022 about the upcoming Atlas successor, and at the time, he said that the powertrain topic for the car was still open for discussion. He was pushing for more power than the car's current powertrains provide.

The current model is powered by the well-known 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder that produces 235 horsepower and 258 lb-ft of torque. There's also a 3.6-liter V6 with 276 hp on tap, but VW has slowly been ridding its range of this aging naturally aspirated V6. In fact, the Atlas is the only VW product that still uses it.

Volkswagen will likely ditch the V6 and focus on the EA888 as it's more adaptable. It can be tuned to produce as little as 184 hp and 221 lb-ft of torque as it does in the base VW Tiguan or as much as 315 hp in the Golf R. There's also an excellent middle ground in the Arteon, which gets the 300 hp/295 lb-ft tune. In the Arteon, it's more about low-down torque, and we think it will be the same in the Atlas.

Don't expect an Atlas R, however. "Whether that will be a full performance version, I'd probably say no," Schafer told CarBuzz in 2022. "But it'll be something that'll give the car a little more horsepower and will stand out over the standard V6 or four-cylinder offerings that we have in the midsize SUV market today."