The Hypercar Lives: Meet VW’s XL1
The XL1 came in at a staggering 313 miles per Imperial gallon of diesel. That’s the efficiency equivalent of more than 230 miles per U.S. gallon of gasoline.
In 1993, after two years’ validation with the industry, RMI put the Hypercar concept into the public domain so nobody could patent it and to encourage competition leveraging its ideas, while RMI’s for-profit spinoffs sought to commercialize technologies outside automakers’ comfort zone and raise the competitive pressure.
.. Two decades ago he claimed regenerative braking could yield 70 percent efficiency when automakers balked at the idea of exceeding 30. Today’s electric vehicles, including the Chevy Volt and Tesla Model S, respectively get 70+ and 80 percent.
.. Despite XL1’s eye-popping mpg rating, VW might have left some efficiency on the table. Lovins notes that Toyota’s 2007 1/X concept car, also a plug-in hybrid, had four seats and the interior volume of a Prius, but weighed only 926 pounds, so even a production-ready version would probably weigh less than the two-seat XL1. “We’re seeing a lot of partially executed solutions,” says Jerry Weiland, the GM veteran who leads RMI’s transportation practice. “Different automakers have done bits and pieces [of the Hypercar concept], but no one has put the whole thing together.”