Volkswagen has finally confirmed the facelifted Polo hatchback will be revealed later in 2021, with an unveiling scheduled to take place in the second quarter of the year.
The Wolfsburg-based firm confirmed the news in its Annual Report, where it said it planned to launch “the updated Polo” soon. A separate slide from the accompanying presentation suggested the popular B-segment hatch’s mid-cycle refresh would be rolled out at some point between the start of April and the end of June.
As a reminder, the sixth-generation Polo hatch was unwrapped in Germany in mid-2017, before hitting the market in South Africa in early 2018 (with the GTI following in June of that year).
A lightly camouflaged version of the facelifted Polo was spotted testing at the start of 2021, leading to speculative (Golf-inspired) renders of the finished product.
While the automaker has yet to release any further details, the facelifted Polo hatch range is expected to feature a broadly similar powertrain line-up to the current model, though there may be a few (mild-hybrid, possibly?) changes for Euro-spec variants thanks to the increasingly stringent emissions regulations enforced on that continent.
Of course, the Polo is manufactured at VW’s factory in the Eastern Cape town of Uitenhage (which has since been renamed Kariega), alongside the prolonged-lifecycle Polo Vivo. In a pandemic-hit 2020, the German company’s SA division exported nearly 82 000 units of the Polo to various international markets.
