High milage VW to go into production.

[elifino]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/car-manufacturers/volkswagen/8293372/Volkswagen-XL1-review.html


Price is still too high for me.

[RegieRocker]

1. Nice car

price is going to be high for most of these types of cars. The Nissan Leaf is priced well though.

[ewagner]

2. diesel-electric hybrid

is the way to go....

second only to MASS TRANSIT!!

[RegieRocker]

4. Only if you need to travel very long distances.

If employers would allow their employees to recharge their cars when arriving at work the all electric cars are far superior except for long distance travel.

[donco]

13. That really depends on

where the electric utility gets their fuel from doesn’t it?

[Motown_Johnny]

20. kinda sorta but not really

Electricity is so much more efficient for moving a vehicle that even if you are getting the power from coal it is better than driving an internal combustion engine.

If they are getting the power from cleaner sources that is gravy.

[TheWraith]

23. Not really.

Even if you get 100% of your electricity from coal, an electric vehicle will still have no worse a carbon footprint than one fueled by gas, and much better than most. The reason for this has to do with efficiency, and how you use energy.

Fossil fuels are used by burning, and burning produces heat. In a gas-fueled engine, that heat is a waste product. It doesn't help drive the vehicle. And since most of the energy in gas is turned into heat, then most of the energy is lost. Contrast that to a fossil fuel power plant, where the heat is directly used to generate electricity. It's not wasted, it's used.

Burning one gallon of gasoline produces about 19.4 pounds of carbon dioxide. The average fuel efficiency for a car in the US is 22.6 miles per gallon, for 1.2 miles per pound of CO2. Now in contrast, one kilowatt hour of energy produced at a coal-fired power plant releases about 2.1 pounds of CO2.

Counting inefficiency in the charging system--the "plug to wheels" number of total power consumption for the entire system--a high performance EV like the Tesla Roadster will get you about 3 miles per kilowatt. If that's 100% coal-fueled, then you're talking 1.42 miles per pound CO2.

The numbers get better for liquid-fueled cars if you take the average fuel efficiency for NEW vehicles, in which case they would very narrowly beat a 100% coal-powered EV. But when you consider that there's almost nowhere in the US that gets it's electricity entirely from coal, EVs bounce back massively.

If you take the average CO2 output per KWh for all US energy generation, 1.341, then you're looking at EVs getting 2.23 miles per pound of CO2. The only vehicles which can compete with that are hybrids such as the Prius.

[taterguy]

15. Mass transit only works when there's high density population

Otherwise you're just wasting a bunch of energy with a large vehicle that's relatively empty.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

3. If GM, Ford and the rest built this when it was needed, say the 70's, the twin

towers would most likely still be standing, and gold plated Rolls would be a thing of fairy tales and automotive mythology.

[sellitman]

5. 50k for a 2 seater is a bit high.

Bring it down to $30k and it would fly out of the showrooms

[drm604]

7. Maybe they can make something more affordable that will get 100 or 200 mpg.

It would be a huge advance even if they didn't get 200 mpg.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Up to 100 will be built

VW CEO Martin Winterkorn identified the XL1's first markets in an interview with ANE at the same event. "We will bring out the XL1 in Europe first, initially Germany. The U.S. and China will follow at a later date," he said.

Winterkorn said there were plans initially for a "small production run” while the company's development chief, Ulrich Hackenberg, said up to 100 XL1 cars could be built.

Read more: http://www.autonewseurope.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110126/ANE/110129905/1317#ixzz1DBfGK2Q8

It's still effectively a prototype.

[FailureToCommunicate]

8. Punch buggy! Kinda odd that it has no back window. But so cool that

they referenced Buckminster Fuller’s 1933 Dymaxion, a car -and inventor- so ahead of their time.

[skepticscott]

9. They still don't tell you

what the REAL mileage equivalent is. They tell you the mileage you get and the amount of liquid fuel you have to put in for that much operation, but most of the propulsion is still coming from electricity. You have to plug the thing in and drain the grid in order to drive that many miles, but the liquid fuel equivalent for the amount of electricity you have to draw is simply left out of the calculation, which makes any figure they supply basically marketing bullshit.

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. 141 mpg (Imperial) = 117mpg (US)

http://www.autocar.co.uk/CarReviews/FirstDrives/Volkswagen-XL1-XL1/255224/

[IDemo]

14. It isn't left out of the calculation

The high mpg figure is actally mpge, or miles per gallon equivalent, which uses the energy content of a gallon of gasoline and compares it to the electrical energy usage per mile (or kilometer). For hybrids, it's a sliding scale depending on how many miles are driven, so not as useful.

I'd like to see them do away with the liquids comparison altogether and stick with miles per megawatt or any other strict measurement of energy to distance, but Americans "need" something they can relate to, so mpge it will probably remain.

[skepticscott]

16. I question whether that is true

that would mean that the efficiency driving a car directly with gasoline is only about one tenth that of electricity production from liquid fossil fuel in a large-scale power plant and the use of electricity to drive the car. Doesn't seem likely.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. Where does your figure of a tenth come from? (nt)

[skepticscott]

19. The article claims a rating

of 313 mpg. Mileage for a vehicle powered entirely by liquid fuel is approximately a tenth of that, if the 313 reflects the gas equivalent of the electricity used.

[muriel_volestrangler]

24. It gets 141 mpg on diesel alone

See post #12. Something that gets 31.3 mpg would be a much larger vehicle, with much worse aerodynamics - eg a Land Rover Discovery 3 gets 30.7 mpg in the combined test.

[skepticscott]

26. Well, VW Jetta and Golf diesels

are rated at about 30 city, 41 Hwy, which is not significantly different when compared to 313. Even the smallest and most economical diesel cars sold in Europe get no better than about 60. Nothing like a real vehicle gets 141 mpg on diesel or any other fossil fuel alone, no matter how you parse the numbers.

[muriel_volestrangler]

27. The best VW Golf gets 74.3mpg on the combined cycle

http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/search/vehicleDetails.asp?id=25188

That's the one they compare the XL1 to here: "To travel at a constant speed of 100 km/h, the prototype only needs 6.2 kW/8.4 PS - a fraction of the performance of today's cars (Golf 1.6 TDI with 77 kW and 7-speed DSG: 13.2 kW/17.9 PS)."

Since the total drag of the XL1 is 2.5 times lower than that of the Golf, and the diesel engine is basically half the Golf engine, this is not entirely surprising.

Remember these are the Imperial gallon figures; but the best 4 seater diesels (a VW Polo, and the Skoda Fabia - which has the same engine) get 83.1 mpg. That would be 60 mpg (US).

[skepticscott]

28. As I said

the best real vehicles with a diesel engine don't get much better than 60 mpg. Yes, maybe you can get some device with wheels and a diesel engine to get more, but simple physics preclude your getting 141 mpg or 313 mpg or any other such ridiculous figure on anything that people will buy and drive.

[muriel_volestrangler]

29. No, simple physics explains it quite easily

The drag of this car is 40% of the Golf's. The weight is 795 kg in comparison to the Golf's 1314 kg - 60%. So it's not at all surprising that it can get almost twice the mpg (141 v. 74) compared to the Golf.

Will people buy it? Well, they're only going to make up to 100 to begin with, and that may indicate that they know the price will be too much for it to be a commercial proposition at present (there's a lot of composites and similar expensive materials in it). But it's a 'real car' - reviewers have been driving it on Qatar streets. They'll be able to use cheaper materials without adding too much weight in future developments.

Volkswagen are putting out a 4 seat car with a 'standard' aerodynamic design and materials that will get 95 mpg. The electric motor is only for starting and hard acceleration.

[IDemo]

18. The mpg or mpge rating is for "tank-to-wheel"

which just means how energy efficient is the power train itself, whether internal combustion or electric.

What you're describing is "well-to-wheel", meaning the overall efficiency - the energy losses incurred from mining or extraction of a resource, to its refinement and transportation to the end user, whether by tanker truck or transmission line, and then adding in the tank to wheel figures. Internal combustion engines are terribly inefficient and waste a great deal of energy through heat losses. Modern electric motors and controllers, on the other hand, are highly efficient. As well, they can recover energy with regenerative braking, something gas engined vehicles can't. They are also usually turned off at stops.

How VW is arriving at 300mpge is beyond me, perhaps the firmware for the controller includes some hypermiling tweaks.

Incidentally, almost none of our power is generated using liquid fossil fuels.

http://www.allcarselectric.com/blog/1051793_epa-rates-2011-nissan-leaf-at-99-mpge-73-mile-range

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_per_gallon_gasoline_equivalent

[skepticscott]

21. Well, that's really my point

It really isn't clear how the 313 mpg figure is arrived at. "Tank-to-wheel" is not an appropriate measure when figuring the electricity equivalent, since the electricity has to come from outside, with all the inefficiencies that you mention. Hybrid vehicles that generate extra stored energy from that expended during braking are another matter. What I'm looking at is, if a vehicle is run solely off electricity that comes from plugging it in, how many miles can it go on the electricity that could be generated by burning the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline (in whatever fuel) in a power plant. While it's significantly better than driving directly by gasoline, it certainly isn't 313, or even close, and the difference cannot be made up just by regenerative braking.

[muriel_volestrangler]

25. Here's how they calculate it:

For the "OVC" range test, the vehicle begins the test with a fully charged battery and is driven over consecutive European drive cycles until the battery reaches its stable minimum state of charge (defined as the point where the battery is no longer being discharged during the drive cycle). Emissions and fuel consumption results are measured and recorded for each of the European drive cycles that the vehicle completes, and are then averaged. A weighted average of these results and those from test with the battery at its minimum state of charge is then calculated, utilising a formula which takes into account the range measured during the "OVC" range test.

http://www.interregs.com/spotlight.php?id=90

Full details are here: http://www.unece.org/trans/main/wp29/wp29regs101-120.html
Amendment 3 to Regulation 101 Rev. 2 seems to be the one implementing this.

[liberal N proud]

10. Why do all these high tech autos have such goofy rear ends?

The only exception I have seen is the Tesla, but from the EV1 to the Prius and this vehicle they have all had the sloped/narrowed rear end.

I understand aerodynamics, but these are extreme.

[Fumesucker]

11. Because the rear is actually more important than the front aerodynamically..

A tapering rear closes the "hole" made in the air by the body more smoothly and cuts down on induced vortices in the airflow that absorb energy to no good purpose.

If you've ever been buffeted around behind a tractor trailer it's those vortices you're feeling, little whirlwinds that shed off the rear of the trailer..

Here is a pretty decent simulation..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8VcZzgdfSc&NR=1

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-100-DFRC.html




This photograph illustrates a standard passenger van modified at the Dryden Flight Research Center to investigate the aerodynamics of trucks. The resulting vehicle--re-fashioned with sheet metal--resembled a motor home, with rounded vertical corners on the vehicle's front and rear sections. For subsequent tests, researchers installed a "boat tail" structure, shown in the photograph. (NASA photo)

[JNelson6563]

22. That's hawt!

Smokin'!