Hybrid concept car achieves record fuel economy

Unveiled at the Qatar motor show this week, the XL1 has actually been in development for around 10 years and could go into low-volume production, according to Angus Fitton, product affairs manager at Volkswagen.

‘The concept has evolved, so it’s a mixture of making clean-sheet design and setting out to make the car as efficient as possible,’ he told The Engineer.

Indeed, back in 2002 Volkswagen released the rather spartan ‘VW one-litre’ concept which used a single-cylinder 8.5bhp diesel engine to achieve a fuel economy milestone of one litre per 100km (or 285mpg).

‘In many ways it was a crude vehicle to drive, but it did demonstrate that if you took vehicle efficiency to extremes, this is what you could achieve. Many of the lessons learnt in that car made it into, for example, Bluemotion models.’

The concept was taken further in 2009 with the quicker and more practical ‘VW L1’, which had a two-cylinder TDI diesel hybrid engine – although fuel economy dropped to 189mpg.