Surely the first sentence of a test drive for the new Golf GTI can get written without making mention of the economy? Perhaps not. But then there is a very good reason for that. It's time to make a suggestion. More than that, a bold assertion, that the Mark VI Golf GTI is the best car in the world you can possibly buy right now.

‘The best', with lots of emphasis, is a wholly subjective phrase, but you only have to look at what's happening to car sales, and interest rates and Gordon Brown's worry lines, to realise that we're all, for the time being, shafted. Then the Golf GTI starts to make a whole lot of sense.

Time it was, not so long ago, when a mid-Thirties trader with a wife up the duff and a maxi-mortgage Victorian semi in Southwest London would put a biggish deposit down on a brand new Porsche 911 Carrera S in black on black and buy the missus a runaround like a 1.4-litre Volkswagen Polo. No longer. Now this same guy, if he still has a job at all, is sitting in a very quiet and empty office wondering what state school will do to his progeny, and only if they've survived their formative years living under Waterloo Bridge. Or something similar.

So two-car families are becoming one-car families. Which can mean only one thing: Porsches are becoming hot hatches. And the only acceptable hot hatch for a Porsche owner is a Golf GTI.

Here is a car that does it all, and does it all better than anything else does it all, or even just does bits of it. ‘It', or in this case ‘it all', is performance, practicality, tractability, affordability, credibility, reliability, safety, quality, subtlety. And there are bound to be loads more ‘ities' that it does better than everyone else. The Mark VI Golf GTI is what happens when, ideologically speaking, that Porsche and that Polo are subject to some sort of stem cell research to find a cure for the fact that nobody can afford fast cars any more. It's the hybrid love child of extravagance and conservatism. And in this respect it is, essentially, perfect.

This all started five years ago when the Mark V GTI was launched and the whole world sat up to take notes. Gone were the bad old days of plobby, rolly polly shopping trolleys with token turbo-charging, to be replaced by a car that, while every inch a modern machine, harked back to that halcyon hot hatch era when the first Golf GTI appeared and turned performance car ownership on its head. Like its forbear, the Mk V was lithe, agile, genuinely fast and still comparatively affordable. And in one fell swoop the hot hatch was re-appropriated from oily seventeen year olds and put back where it belonged, in the hands of the Yuppie. Or his new millennial descendant.

This next offering, in what is now the GTI's 33rd year, is a pretty subtle evolution of the Mk V, a car that itself hasn't shown the slightest hint of ageing since its arrival. The changes made do make for a better car, but without taking away from what also made its immediate predecessor a great one.