VW Golf Mark6 News - It's the new Golf! - 2008

This is the new VW Golf. The Mark Six.

It's due to be formally unveiled this autumn, and if you're tutting sorrowfully to yourself and muttering, 'It seems like only yesterday the last new Golf turned up,' you're not far wrong.

VW has basically pulled that trick of wandering into a nursing home and winding all the clocks forward a couple of hours by rushing in the MkVI just five years after the MkV - two years earlier than expected.

It's something of a shotgun wedding, in truth: VW is finding the current Golf just too expensive to build, so the MkVI has been made simpler, more straightforward and quicker to assemble than an Ikea lampshade. Much quicker.

To keep costs (and weight) down, it's based on the MkV platform - fine by us - but with a new skin and touchy-feely interior. Get used to that lower, wide front end: it's the new VW 'family face' that'll be rolled out across the range over the next couple of years.

VW boss Martin Winterkorn is so sick of the shiny big shield grille of the Eos, Passat CC and the rest that he's ditched the poor bloke who designed them. Probably saves a couple of quid on chrome trim, too.

Expect engines to follow those in the Audi A3, which means common-rail diesels and lots of lovely little direct-injection turbo petrols.

Better still, we're promised that the new Golf GTI will get more power than the current gen, as well as a big black diffuser and the angry, jutting face from the W12 concept.

It's due to turn up just a couple of months after the MkVI Golf hits production... so just in time for the MkVII, then?