Gadgetory

if a car if you get a hundred miles per gallon that'd be pretty great if it get 200 miles per gallon that'd be insane oh this car gets 261 miles per gallon this is the Volkswagen xl1 and how did books wagon do it partly through aerodynamics partly through lightweight and partly through a very advanced plug-in hybrid powertrain this car has a two cylinder turbo diesel engine which makes 47 horsepower it also has a 27 horsepower electric motor attached to that and there's a 5.5 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack in this car okay we've got a diesel plug-in hybrid powertrain and that helps this car achieve really excellent fuel economy it can actually travel under electric power for about 30 miles and with those power figures the Volkswagen xl1 obviously isn't a fast car it actually takes 12 point seven seconds to get to 62 miles an hour but it does have a top speed of a hundred miles an hour now that's electronically limited but you probably don't want to go any faster in a car like this then as far as aerodynamics go this body style actually looks a lot like the Honda Insight there's no real developmental cooperation there it's all comes down to aerodynamics the shape of the Volkswagen xl1 and the original Honda Insight were both dictated by a need for the best aerodynamics possible this thing achieves 0.198 coefficient of drag and that's substantially less than the Toyota Prius it's also incredibly lightweight Volkswagen uses carbon fiber reinforced panels all over the car and for the chassis there's also aluminum parts in here and a little bit of high-strength steel but mostly it comes down to very lightweight materials the overall weight of this car is around 1,800 pounds now the engine and the electric motor and the battery pack are about 500 pounds of that the body is another 500 pounds none of the running gear and things add more weight to the whole mix but it still achieves incredible fuel economy with all that instead of side view mirrors it uses cameras mounted in the doors and the driver can actually look at the side view through the panels in the doors the interior is actually they fit two seats in here although the passenger seat is staggered back a little bit so the hip room can be a little narrower and finally we have a 7-speed dual-clutch automated manual transmission this will get really good efficiency for that diesel hybrid powertrain now this car is not actually a constant Volkswagen is gonna burn you sit it's been working on this concept of a 1 liter car for a long time now that means 1 litre 400 kilometers they've achieved even better than that in this production xl1 at 0.9 liters per 100 kilometers and that equals 261 miles per gallon I win Cunningham here at the 2013 Geneva Auto Show