The one-time South African, World and European Car of the Year winning Volkswagen Polo, is built right here in little old South Africa and a new facelift version of it has been spied undergoing testing in Europe. There are such miniscule changes to its styling, Volkswagen probably thought nobody would notice and therefore didn’t bother with camouflage.
A subtle facelift for the award winning Volkswagen Polo is only really visible through changes on the redesigned front bumper, a smaller aerial and air intake. What is far more important is the TSI lettering on the backend. This suggests a healthy dose of turbocharged downsizing is in offing for the facelifted 5th generation Polo.
We sincerely hope this applies to our home-grown Polo models as well. They’ve had to make do with old, normally aspirated engines that were already due for a reworking when the car was launched in 2010. Engine options like the 1.2-litre TSI 63 kW would surely improve performance and reduce fuel consumption. An engine that’s missing in the line-up is a sub-1-litre TSI turbo, like you get in the 900cc Renault Clio 4.
This facelift Polo looks so benign in fact we half suspect more updates may be on the way for the production Polo, suggesting the car in the images is simply an early prototype. But then why not camouflage it a little better? Covered dashboards also suggest we can expect small changes on the inside.
Perhaps the facelifted Volkswagen Polo will be unveiled at the 2013 Frankfurt motor show in September? We doubt that though. The next generation Polo will almost certainly use the new MQB platform, just like the Golf, which means it is still a long way away.
