You may have seen a lot of stories floating around about how VW’s new Mission Efficiency concept has a range of about 900 miles; that isn’t true. It’s about half that, which is still quite good, but let’s talk about how we knew it was wrong.
Remember the Volkswagen XL1? Back in 2013, in the heady days before Dieselgate made everything so unsavory, VW showed off an incredible little car that looked like a sleek spaceship, a diesel plug-in hybrid with a drag coefficient of 0.189 (for comparison, the Lucid Air has the lowest Cd of 0.197, and a Tesla Model S has 0.208) and got somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 mpg. I got to drive one around Manhattan once, long ago! It felt pretty futuristic. Well, now that we are actually in the future, complete with everyone freaking out about a robot uprising, VW has provided a suitably updated new spaceship-like car, and this time it’s all-electric and even more of, well, everything, if “everything” is efficiency.
VW is calling this new car “Mission Efficiency” and describing it as “the world’s most efficient near-production electric car,” which is sort of a strange set of qualifiers. “Near-production” means, what, that they’re actually going to build these, and it’s not just a concept? They may mean “production” in the sense of how the XL1s were “production” where they only built 250 of them, though to VW’s credit, 200 of those were sold to retail customers. Oh, and they cost the equivalent of about $180,000 in today’s money.
Oh, and the Cd of Mission Efficiency is a shocking 0.158, which is a new record for a car approved to drive on normal roads. (The frontal area is 2.08 m², so if you want to calculate the drag at a given velocity at a given air density, you can for fun).
If this thing looks remarkably like the old XL1, there’s a reason for that, and that’s because the laws of aerodynamics haven’t changed in the past decade or so, which means the same basic shapes still are the most efficient.
One of the more interesting differences between the Mission Efficiency and the XL1 has to do with the side mirrors; specifically, that the new car has them:
The older XL1 concept forwent (that’s a weird word) side mirrors in favor of cameras and screens, but it now seems that the hit taken by the external mirrors isn’t worth the cost, complexity, and energy draw of camera-based systems. Plus, camera side mirrors still aren’t legal in America.
Okay, let’s talk about the part VW is most excited about, the efficiency. VW took the existing front-wheel drive drivetrain from their ID.Polo, with its 133 hp electric motor and 54.9 kWh battery, so there’s no new exotic hardware under the hood, just stuff that is already in production, which is good. It’s even built on the same MEB+ platform.
VW took the Mission Efficiency on a test run of 1,278 km (794.11 miles) from Wolfsburg, Germany, to Vienna, Austria. When they arrived in Vienna, they had 164 km/102 miles of range left, which is where many media outlets are getting that roughly 900 mile range figure. But that’s not really what happened, and I almost made the same mistake myself, until our EIC David caught that something didn’t smell right about that sort of number from a 55 kWh battery.
[Ed Note: I don’t want to seem mean because I love many of these outlets, but unless there was a change in VW’s press release that I’m not aware of, saying it was confusing and that’s why so many got this wrong is being a bit generous. Any huge claim should always be approached with some amount of skepticism, and this should have been extremely obvious. 900 miles out of a 55 kWh battery means an efficiency of 16 mi/kWh. That’s three to four times the efficiency of even some of the slipperiest, lightest, smoothest-rolling cars on the road. This was obviously not right, especially since in VW’s own press release, it mentions an efficiency of 6.89 kWh/100 km, which is about 9 mi/kWH. It literally tells you how far it goes on a certain amount of battery capacity, and then it tells you the battery capacity. This thing goes about 9 mi/kWh*55kWh = 495 miles on a charge. Not 900. What’s more, it says clearly in the press release that the car charged once during that trip.
I’m fallible myself, but it’s the scale of this mistake that confuses me. The fact that somehow seemingly nobody read the press release and nobody thought “900 miles out of a 55 kWh battery. That doesn’t pass the laugh test” kinda worries me. But again, it’s possible I’m missing something, . -DT]
VW’s press release is worded in a somewhat confusing manner, but it notes that there was a stop to charge the car en route. Based on that, and using VW’s own numbers, which they proudly note in the press release:
On an officially documented consumption test drive over a distance of 1,278.36 km from Volkswagen’s German Development Centre in Wolfsburg via Poznań (Poland) and Olmütz (Czech Republic) to the Austrian capital Vienna, the Mission Efficiency achieved real consumption of 7.51 kWh/100 km including charging losses (6.89 kWh/100 km without charging losses). The route was completed with an average speed of 67.72 km/h; the top speed was 138 km/h. The 54.9 kWh battery (net) was only charged once during the journey. On arrival in Vienna, it had a remaining range of 164.0 km.
I did reach out to VW to confirm the range, and was told this:
On our test track in Wolfsburg under specific conditions (constant 68km/h), we reached out a range of 821km (7km remaining range) with one charge.
So, that’s a range of about 514.5 miles per charge at a constant speed of just over 42 mph, a way no one ever really drives. So, the 450 mile real-world number feels right to me.
Despite not being something absurdly high like 900 miles of range, the car is quite efficient, with VW noting that the Mission Efficiency is as efficient at 87 mph as the regular ID.Polo is at 62 mph. Still, to get there, VW also had to have some special tires; from the press release:
“The optimal tyre is another point of leverage for reducing fuel consumption and increasing the vehicle’s range. Working closely with Continental, Volkswagen developed a concept tyre based on the EcoContact 7 series tyre, which with a rolling resistance of 4.9 kilogrammes per tonne is about 25 per cent below the threshold for the EU’s best tyre label class A. Essentially, the sidewall and the tread compound have been optimised to minimise energy losses during rolling.”
VW did at least try to make the car somewhat practical, being a 2+2 instead of a strict two-seater like the XL1 was.
That urinal-shaped thing in the middle of the dash I guess is for storage, since there seems to be no glove box or anything. Actually, storage isn’t too terrible, with about 17 cubic feet of storage in a rear trunk, and while there’s no frunk, there are these nifty little storage cubbies aft of the rear wheels:
There’s also solar cells integrated into the glass roof and rear window, making a total of 370W of output, but that’s under ideal circumstances. They claim it can increase range by 30 km/day, but I’d take that with some salt.
VW is claiming a world record for the car’s run, but it is a very specific record:
9 mi/kWh for a “near-production, everyday four-seater electric vehicle when driving on public roads” is good. So, sure, I guess they earned that.
As far as the overestimation of range that seems to have been everywhere, well, I make plenty of mistakes, too. But it’s a good reminder that things that sound too good to be true often are, and to 1. read the press release more closely and B. do the math.
This is a case where all it took was paying attention for maybe 2 minutes while watching a 4 minute summary video on 2x speed to catch and doing some rather elementary math
All journalists need to be skeptical 1st bf reporting. Lack there of os shrugging basic responsibilities of journalism and therefore providing zero value.
What? No mention about the taillight situation? I like the styling details of the tail end (and lights) of the car although I don’t think it would fare well in a rear-ender with anything taller than a Miata.
Always liked the shape and raison d’être of the XL1, and appreciated that it actually went into (very limited) production. This M:E car seems similar albeit it’s an EV of course, and it’s probably nicer to drive than the XL1 was, what with its single-cylinder diesel motor thrumping around next to the driver. Still, such a thing won’t be going into production for American consumers at any kind of reasonable price in my remaining lifetime.
Heck, VW doesn’t even deign to bring US drivers anything from its Up! or Polo lines of cars, and they even took the (comparitively huge) regular Golf away from us too. If they can’t rationalize selling a Golf in America (let alone an Up! or Polo) then there’s no way we’d ever see a M:E or anything remotely like it in a VW showroom here. 🙁 TBH, there’s exactly nothing in VWs current US lineup that I’d consider interesting or desirable to me, and that includes its EVs, and the Mk8/9/whatever GTI and the GolfR too.
VWs smaller/newer/sometimes EV cars that it offers in Europe are way more appealing to me. But that’s just me, and I already swore I wouldn’t buy yet another VW. 😉
A country without Polos is a country in need.
(I may be a bit of a VW Polo fanboi, but I’ve only owned six. Ok, maybe seven.)
I’m genuinely envious. 🙂
Hmmm. Very interesting. I was not aware that drag coefficients could make such a huge difference, but I guess the racing community knows this as does the aerospace industry. Still, 450 mile real world range is quite impressive. The bigger question is how long does it take to recharge. Cheers.
Given a roughly 9% charge loss, and current charge rates for similar size packs, you’re looking at 20-30 minutes for a 10%-80% charge, and an additional 35-40 minutes for 80%-100%.
Generally speaking, 35mph is where most cars suffer more drag from air than everything else combined. Due to the low Cd of this car, it’s closer to 44mph. This is huge because drag increases with speed^2, so highway driving is massively more efficient than normal.
A cool experiment, but glad you guys highlighted the 42mph average speed…my Ioniq 6 (AWD, least efficient model) will easily get >5mi/kWh doing low speeds over flat terrain. Best I’ve gotten was 5.9mi/kWh over 30mi, but with an overall slight decrease in elevation.
And as far as the mirrors go, manufacturers love to make a big stink about their efficiency hit, but again the Ioniq 6 is a good reference here — the EU model w/o real mirrors has a .21 drag coefficient, mine with the US-required “analog” mirrors has a .22. Hardly earth-shattering. I suspect door handles are a similar situation, but I have no data there.
0.01Cd is actually quite a significant difference given how optimized EV aero already is. Without the Mission Efficiency’s rear wheel covers, narrow rear track, low rear headroom, and narrow wheels, sedans struggle to get much below 0.20Cd. Drag coefficients scale pretty well to range especially at high speed, so a 4.5% reduction could mean ~10-15 miles more range or 3-4 kWh smaller battery pack for the ’23 SE RWD with the 361mi EPA rating.
This new VW is also larger than it looks. A 2.08 m^2 frontal area puts it in league with many midsized sedans from the 1990s/2000s in terms of width. There are similarly aerodynamic shapes that allow for more headroom and legroom(see the GM Precept, 0.159 Cd).
6+ miles/kWh at speed on US highways should really be the default expectation, and not some rare exception. Trucks/SUVs are the wrong application for EV technology. The tech really shines in sedans, small/light sports cars, and hatchbacks, all vehicle categories with low margins that the auto industry would rather you not buy. And the technology becomes a lot more sustainable both environmentally and economically in these more efficient vehicles because you don’t need a massive 100+ kWh battery pack anymore to get acceptable range, when a 35-40 kWh one will do just fine for the bottom of the market, you know the demographic where the money savings possible with an EV will actually be well-served by, a demographic which also either doesn’t have or refuses to spend $60,000+ on some tech-laden, bloated pig of a vehicle.
VW needs to quit messing around and bring the ID2 to the US. It’s great looking, efficient, practical, and affordable. I love the idea of this concept, but VW needs to quit looking for a lotto win and just hit some singles and doubles to work up to hitting homers.
Jason I’m pretty sure AI summaries don’t run laugh tests or sniff tests. Since those also equate to critical thinking and perhaps just careful reading, I’d say that AI sucks.
Remind me why a few billionaire corporations get to decide the fate of the planet by running AI with few guardrails? The other billions of planetary people don’t get a say or a choice?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (Carl SAGAN).
I have been using this quote a lot lately.
Great job picking this up. 900 miles is clearly in the realm of extraordinary. The actual range and efficiency is still remarkable, but more inside the believeable realm.
This error is what happens when someone prompts an AI for a press release on one end, and someone else prompts another AI for a summary of the same release.
I’m not saying EVERYONE involved did this, but pay attention now how often those mistakes will start popping up. This is the problem with the “good enough” use of tech, everyone will level at the bottom.
Also, “That urinal-shaped thing” is the filigram that conveys that this text was carefully crafted by a human (or human-like) intelligence. Never change, Torch. At least not until the Autopian pollute their training enough that AI start spewing out urinal shaped metaphors, in which case I say the robot apocalypse will have been worth it.
“That urinal-shaped thing in the middle of the dash”
Umm. Don’t hold your breath for a test drive invite. lol.
(Could be a sandbox too!)
Or a litter box for your onboard cat. I did laugh at that description.
I am not a normal person. I am an Autopian and I like this vehicle for both its design and engineering. I drive a 2027 Bolt, which is not pretty. I like the Bolt with the exception of the unstable (not driving control) software (shades of Windows 95; requiring a reboot relatively frequently) and the poor efficiency (official 3.6 mi/kWh, observed 3.3 mi/kWh over the first 1100 miles). I bought it because it was cheap and, as I’ve reported before, the local government air quality district gave me $10K towards its purchase, when I gave up my 2004 Acura TL to the scrap yard.
One should always try to do a ‘back-of-the-envelope’ calculation when facing questionable data.
Reading is hard, apparently.
Came here to say that. This is a simple reading comprehension thing really…
TBF that’s a little over double what my Mach E Select gets with a 20% larger battery.
As a former Gen 1 Honda Insight owner, I’m intrigued. But I’m typically too cheap to buy new cars. Be interesting to see if it makes it to the United States any year soon and at what price.
To me, the only thing this concept proves is that battery chemistry improvements are really the only path towards making electric cars a success.
This this is so compromised as a vehicle, both practically and visually. No normal person will ever consider this. And even with all that, the efficiency numbers aren’t amazing. They’re good, but not nearly good enough to ask for this much compromise.
We’ve basically achieved max aero efficiency. We know how, and the rules don’t change. People just don’t want to drive a teardrop.
More kWh out of the same footprint (or smaller) battery is the only way forward. There’s a lot more headroom for improvement in battery chemistry than there is in aero efficiency.
People may not want to drive a teardrop, but they sure will when regular hits $12 a gallon and wages remain stillborn.
I want to drive a teardrop, that thing looks rad. Properly futuristic.
Electric cars are already miles more efficient and electricity markets are mostly decoupled (increasingly so) from the price of crude.
You aren’t that much efficiency with this teardrop, but you’re losing so much of what makes a car good.
What makes a car “good”? Less is more.
Give me a super-efficient, lightweight teardrop, and shove a Corvette’s engine and a 6-speed manual transmission in the damned thing! I want to get 60+ mpg highway with that and do 70 mph on the highway just idling the damned thing! And play with 7-figure hypercars on a fraction of the budget.
It is a concept.
If ever there is a production version, it will be dialed down untill they can sell enough of them.
If there never is a production version, they might trickle down some of what they have learned. And it is still great publicity.
Personally, I have owned and dailied a few teardrop-adjacent cars (Audi A2 / Toyota prius). This shape has very clear advantages. A good streamline means less insulation needed for a calm, quiet cabin and less engine needed for a spirited responsive drivetrain. All of this saves weight, which saves double in the spirited and responsive traits.
It doesn’t seem any less practical than a Honda CRX, and I bought three of those. It’s arguably more practical than an Elise, MX5, 350Z, MR2, RX7 or Z4, and I bought eleven of those.
0.158 drag coefficient is actually quite far from max aero efficiency for a ground vehicle usable on the road. I own a Milan SL velomobile that has a Cd value of 0.08.
Below are some road-worthy solar-electric cars capable of seating 2-4 people that have Cd values below 0.10, and which can exceed 15 miles per kWh in real-world driving at 100+ km/h highway speeds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYKmFQRj7wM
The SunSwift 7 is the iteration I find most interesting. 1,000 km highway range on a 38 kWh battery. Cd of 0.095. It can seat 4. The Sunswift SR8 is more of a sports car, and performance figures have yet to be published.
Given the resource shortages staring us in the face, we will probably have cars like the above in the future, or alternatively, no cars at all…
I second checking out that 34 min. interview of one of the leaders of the NSW U iversity SunSwift leaders.
I would Love to build a similar vehicle as a DD or Eindhoven University Stella Vie & a version of the Stella Vita as a rv / utility / personal transport van.
https://solarteameindhoven.nl/stella-family
Bobby (Robert Llwellyn) made a great 15 min video on it a while back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vHuldVlpFA
My full-suspension quadricycle is being turned into a solar-electric one-seater microcar disguised as an ebike. I expect to get the aerodynamics good enough that 250W of solar panels + pedaling alone in direct sunlight at the street legal class 3 ebike limit of 28 mph won’t even draw down the battery, but elsewise, maybe ~30 Wh/mile @ 70 mph. It will weigh all of about 120 lbs when finished, including roll cage and body, with a 2.1 kWh battery on board.
@Toecutter you gotta convince one of the writers to do a ‘members rides’ feature of you!
I love your commuter / DD based off of your comments about it, this is the direction to improve fitness and minimize impact.
This fellow Minnesotan built a very similar in concept HPV / Electric hybrid to yours*, that he was intending to mass produce but I dont think he ever got the funding.
*hpv/ev hybrid of course being Very common in the velomobile space, which overall as a transportation solution is (sadly) rather uncommon for thr average person.
https://inhabitat.com/minnesota-based-duo-builds-a-three-wheeled-hybrid-electric-vehicle-that-gets-75-miles-per-charge/
On a positive note, Happy to hear the creator of the ELF is making a version 3.0 too!
https://wordlesstech.com/the-elf-3-0-pedal-and-solar-powered-vehicle/
I’m familiar with both of those vehicles.
The difference is that mine is intended to be light enough to be pedaled with the motor shut off on a dead battery. And also a lot more aerodynamically efficient than either of those, in order to help offset the added mass vs a normal unmotorized velomobile.
If I do this right, I’ll be able to maintain a 20 mph rolling average on a dead battery just pedaling it and climb a 25% gradient at 2 mph with my own two feet.
I don’t want to do a feature on my vehicle until it is ready. It might be a few years. I still have to do a new body for it. When it was still a three-wheeler, the previous body got totalled, otherwise it might have been finished in that guise by now. It was going to be a 3WD tadpole trike with a hub motor in each wheel, but then I saw cheap parts to convert it into a quad and loved the idea of not flipping over because the rear wheel got snagged on a deep pothole or someone hit me from behind while I was moving at speed. I had an updated body for a tadpole already designed, but that was incomptible with the quad conversion, because I need to get the aerodynamics right.
I think the explanation to the similar design is plain old phoned in: As the don’t have so many billions for fun projects now as in the Piëch times, the just had some intern make a new front and rear “face” for the XL1.. And as they say themselves the tech is also from another car.
But who cares, it looks great! And obviously works. I would love one 🙂
– And if the range was really REALLY long, you would actually need an internal urinal! 😀
I am inclined to wonder how expensive the weight and drag reduction required to achieve additional range from a small battery is, vs the cost of putting a bigger battery in it.
You get faster charging, which isn’t nothing, but given that this range seems to have been achieved by sacrificing things normal humans generally are willing to pay for (space, SUV layout, styling, SUV layout, interior features, SUV layout, and materials perhaps?) in exchange for trying things we already knew work anyway (less power, drag, and frontal area yields greater efficiency), I’m not 100% sure what this exercise was for. Who’s going to pay extra money up front to buy a car that sacrifices the features they want to save them the money they spent already long-term?
I predict efficiency is going to be a top selling point again. That means no suvs. Consumers are already beginning to associate them as wasteful pigs.
“Consumers are already beginning to associate them as wasteful pigs.”
The fact that the market is rapidly converging around only being SUVs and pickups suggests otherwise.
I agree. The average person will want more range from more battery (or a denser battery), not from aero efficiencies that compromise the entire car.
You actually don’t necessarily get faster charging if you’re comparing battery packs with the same cells, unless you’re limited by charger output or measuring by distance charged rather than percent.
The cost equation doesn’t just include the literal battery cost, it also includes extra structural reinforcement needed for the extra weight a bigger battery entails. Automakers talked about the weight-cost positive feedback loop death spiral at length in the 2021-23 time frame. I guess the lower sustained cooling requirements too but that’s a tiny cost.
Nobody reads anything in 2026.
I had a helpful LLM distill this article down to a bullet point list of emojis that were then transformed into a 10 second Youtube short.
I only watched the first 3 seconds so I may have missed something.
Your comment was TLDR
Son is that you?!?!
I didn’t even click, just half-read the key frame.
I’ll respond to this as soon as my botler has parsed it and thought up a suitably snappy reply, sparing me all the fuss and bother of reading and replying, while unironically and with no self-awareness shifting the burden of interpreting garbage on to other people so I can have more free time to keep not reading things.
VW must be afraid of their imaginary xl1 makert getting eaten up by aptera and bolt.
Also “with one charge” they didn’t say when the charge was ? Was it at the beginning was it half way though? Weird way to say that. Might be innocent but also feels not innocent in the scheme of things.
VW deliberately mislead us about the capabilities of their vehicles? It certainly seems like something they’ve already been convicted of.
I can’t help but think that if the original press release had used imperial units (including US gallons), rather than metric units, this whole misunderstanding would have been completely avoided.
There’s something that always bothers me when the XL1 is discussed, we all know it as the car that VW made as a science project to get maximum mpg out of a production capable vehicle. When they were done the car got 240mpg US. Except that number is highly misleading.
Per the wiki page for the XL1
In February 2013, Volkswagen announced that it expected the XL1 to achieve a fuel consumption of 0.9 L/100 km (260 mpg‑US; 310 mpg‑imp) and emissions of 21 g/100 km of CO2. The test cycle allows for a re-charge of the battery every 75 km (47 mi) which results in a high mpg value.
Using diesel alone the car is capable of up to 2.0 L/100 km (120 mpg‑US; 140 mpg‑imp).[5] One reviewer found that, in real-life traffic, with air conditioning on and without attempts at hypermiling, the car is able to reliably achieve 2.3 L/100 km (100 mpg‑US; 120 mpg‑imp).[25]
Still a highly impressive number, but it’s not exactly obvious that the stated number involves recharging the battery every 47mi, with real world being less than half of what VW touted.
That weird ‘mileage with battery charged’ figure that WLTP provides is something that all PHEV/EREVs mislead people with, I think it must be because it’s a mandatory statistic to report.
The power of a relatively efficient aero and driving the speed limit…
I have a 17′ Prius Prime (PHEV) that 8 months out of the year in DD driving duties I get in excess of 150 mpg.
How? 1 way commute is 17.0 miles. Each day I start with between 30-34 miles of all ev range and run it in EV mode as much as possible and drive the speed limit.
Acct. to the onboard trip computer the lifetime avg. consumption is 104.6 mpg. Huge caveat is I bought it with 100k miles and at the time I bought it it had an indicated lifetime mpg avg. of 63.3 mpg. It now has 149k miles on it.
Current ‘tank’ is just shy of 1500 miles and just under 1/4th of a gas tank left, which means 8 months out of the year ignoring any long road trips I fill it up w/gas 1x every 2-3 months. In the winter (Im in MN), I get between 1000 – 1200 miles to a tank, which means at its least efficient in DD driving it still is over 100 mpg (9 gallon tank).
Assuming an avg. fuel cost of $4.00, avg. anual gas fuel.cost is less.than $300. It has a 8.8kw hv battery, so 8.8 x 0.19 (local cost per kw) x 250 (days) is $418 for a total anual fuel cost of $718