Speaking at a recent Japanese event, Polyphony Digital head-honcho Kazunori Yamauchi-san confirmed that he expects to see real-time damage in the next instalment of Gran Turismo (GT5) on the PlayStation 3.

Talking with Eurogamer a while back, Yamauchi briefly mentioned that GT4 will be the last Gran Turismo game on the PS2 and he has now made it fairly clear that a next-gen version of GT5 is on the boards.

Ever since the first Gran Turismo on PSone, the inability to damage cars has been a big criticism of the series. Polyphony previously couldn’t include car damage because the majority of car manufacturers didn’t want to have realistic models of their cars being damaged in video games.

Fortunately now, it would appear that Polyphony, after four iterations of the sector-leading franchise, have managed to convince the motor industry to allow car damage for the next Gran Turismo game.

Yamauchi and his team are maintaining that they will only include realistic car damage when they can create realistic car physics/handling that reflects the damage of the vehicle. No further details have been revealed yet, like as to whether the cars will be able to flip, but we be the first to let you know if they do.