![]() ![]() It is by no means light, but new battery packaging and materials make it thousands of pounds lighter than the long-range EQS on sale today. It is a true streamliner, an aggressive kammback sedan that moves on from the bubbly shape of the EQS and EQE production cars while significantly improving their market-leading drag coefficient anyway. ![]() This is not a production car yet, and unlike the XL1 it is more likely to be a showcase for many individual future production car traits than it is to be produced as a halo car itself, but the spirit of Volkswagen's strangest moonshot lives on. But this is what makes the Vision EQXX, the development-project-slash-concept that the Mercedes EQ electric imprint unveiled today, so special. With the Plaid line, Tesla took their performance benchmarks from "unbeatably quick in a straight line one time" to "fast everywhere." Even the Hummer badge came back, now as a monument to the appeal of big batteries, big power and big curb weights.Ĭontinued battery and powertrain advancements meant cars were consistently getting more efficient over a greater range anyway, but market conditions had left efficiency behind as a goal to build a car around. With the EQS, Mercedes brought S-Class luxury into the 2020s in a glow of infotainment screens and white vegan leather. With the Taycan, Porsche bettered the original Model S with an all-electric sport sedan that could compete with any gas-powered option. Luxury, performance, and technological advancement became the way forward for the electric halo car, and the inherent efficiency of an electric car was enough for these companies to build toward those goals without creating cars dedicated to the concept like the XL1. The series hybrid had already been rendered irrelevant anyway, and the post-Tesla era led just about every OEM in the world to redefine what they were hoping to create with their battery electric cars. The efficiency miracle, the hypermiling hypercar, was noxious to the company that desperately needed its status as an earth-conscious halo car.Īnd so, it seemed, the hypermiling dream had died. The car that meant to show how powerful efficiency-first engineering could be was carrying a variant of the family of engines that produced Dieselgate, all while being attached at the hip to the name of the man that established the culture that created it. Its range-extending motor was a two cylinder Volkswagen diesel championed by Ferdinand Piëch himself, which placed it firmly in the crosshairs of the biggest automotive scandal of the decade. Performance, luxury, and complication were all in style at the same time, leaving very little room for Volkswagen's little hypermiler and its vision of a future of ultra-efficient series hybrids.īut that was not the worst thing to happen to the XL1. Eventually, that same Model S also became a beacon of software-forward car development that made technology features an increasingly important element of the electric car world. Through the Tesla Model S and other big all-electric cars like it, battery-powered cars without range extenders came into vogue as performance and luxury solutions of their own right. ![]() The debate between range-extended series hybrids like the Chevrolet Volt and low-use all-electric cars like the Nissan Leaf became obsolete, making cars that toed the line between the two like the BMW i3 irrelevant with them. As batteries got better at storing power and charging stations got better at delivering it, range anxiety became a smaller and smaller concern by the year. It was also becoming outdated very quickly. It was the second engineering masterpiece of the Ferdinand Piëch era of the Volkswagen auto group, to efficiency what his Bugatti Veyron was to outright performance. Sure, Volkswagen had had a range-topper of its own before in the luxurious Phaeton, but the XL1 served to redefine the Volkswagen brand as the forefront of an economical and efficient future by maximizing the potential of the series hybrid in a case study available for purchase. In American terms, that translates to 235 miles per gallon.īy the time it reached production as an ultra-limited run road car, it had become the first ever hypermiling halo car. The name of the first concept, L1, was meant to indicate that it was a "1 liter" car, one that would travel 100 kilometers on one single liter of fuel. A world still fearing range anxiety saw EVs as a distant future in need of a bridge, so Volkswagen imagined an electric car that could charge itself and still use available technology to deliver unparalleled power efficiency. When Volkswagen introduced the first XL1 concept, the series hybrid looked like the future. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |