To listen to automakers snipe about tightening fuel economy standards, you’d think it impossible to squeeze more miles from a barrel of Extract of Arabia. This, of course, is not the case, particularly if you design a vehicle expressly to drive far and drink little.
Forget power, space, and speed: Volkswagen AG’s latest idea-on-wheels does not address the requirements of the average American family driver. What it can do is travel more than 100 kilometers on a single liter of fuel. Translation: 235 miles per gallon.
Feature originally published in Popular Science August at 2002, republished by author John Matras
The Volkswagen 1L Concept’s designers combined highly tuned aerodynamics, exotic materials, and a 0.3-liter diesel engine to achieve 0.99 liters per 100 kilometers. The project, the brainchild of engineer Thomas Gänsicke, is an engineering exercise and therefore has rather whimsical features. Most noticeable are the car’s canoe-like proportions: It’s 4 feet wide and 11 feet long. Occupants sit tandem, the passenger straddling the driver’s seat, both wedged under a 4-foot-long gullwing canopy.
Three video cameras eliminate the mileage-reducing wind drag of rearview mirrors. Wheels are faired in, side-cooling air inlets open only when necessary, and even the keylocks have been replaced by a proximity unlocking system. The resulting coefficient of drag is 0.159, compared with 0.30 or so for most production cars.
The slinky carbon-fiber bodywork covering the magnesium frame is just the beginning of the unobtainium-based technology used throughout. The front suspension is a combination of titanium, aluminum, magnesium, and ceramics and weighs less than 18 pounds. The single-cylinder four-stroke diesel engine has monoblock construction—there’s no separate cylinder head—and is all aluminum. Fuel is atomized directly into the cylinder at 28,000 psi. Two overhead camshafts operate the one exhaust and two inlet valves. The fuel pump is magnesium, the exhaust system titanium.
The engine produces a thundering 8.5 hp and weighs only 57 pounds. It conspires with a 6-speed gearbox—magnesium housing, hollow shafts, titanium bolts—to pinch miles from the diesel fuel. The transmission shifts electronically, killing the engine when an onboard computer foresees an inkling of fuel savings. A starter-generator, with energy stored in nickel-metal batteries, rekindles the engine as necessary. Because the electric motor only restarts the engine, Gänsicke explains that if fuel economy wasn’t paramount, the motor could be used to increase horsepower and torque by 30%. “But that’s not the effect we wanted.” In fact, he’s terribly specific about performance, other than to say that the top speed exceeds 70 mph and that it’s “not very quick and accelerating.”
It can, he promises, “swim with the usual traffic.” Who better to emphasize that point than Ferdinand Piëch, chairman of VW? For the most recent board meeting in April, Piëch drove the Volkswagen 1L car from Wolfsburg to Homburg, 110 miles, averaging 264 miles per gallon on the way. That works out to an ultra-miserly 0.89 L per 100 km. Of course, “0.89-liter car” doesn’t quite have the same ring.
VW 1-Liter Car
Length: 143.7 in.
Width: 49.1 in.
Height: 43.7 in.
Weight: 588 pounds
Peak Power: 8.5 hp
Fuel Capacity: 1.7 gal.
Mileage: 235 mpg
VW 1-Liter Car
Length: 143.7 in.
Width: 49.1 in.
Height: 43.7 in.
Weight: 588 pounds
Peak Power: 8.5 hp
Fuel Capacity: 1.7 gal.
Mileage: 235 mpg
VW 1-Liter Car
Length: 143.7 in.
Width: 49.1 in.
Height: 43.7 in.
Weight: 588 pounds
Peak Power: 8.5 hp
Fuel Capacity: 1.7 gal.
Mileage: 235 mpg
Addendum: Alas, I didn’t drive this, though I don’t recall having read that anyone in the media had. Likely the Volkswagen 1L was noisy, slow to accelerate and rough riding, with hard tires to reduce rolling resistance. Or maybe not.
Volkswagen sought to make diesel sexy and what’s more automotively sexy than racing? To that end, VW created a one-spec racing series called Volkswagen Jetta TDI Cup, which pitted drivers in specially-prepared diesel-powered VW Jetta sedans. And naturally, if “race on Sunday, sell on Monday” works, Volkswagen prepared street versions of the race cars, lacking only roll bars and such needed for the track. For more about that, read my review of the Volkswagen Jetta TDI Cub Edition.
