AD&P; > September 2013 > FEATURE > Volkswagen Goes Common—But With a Difference > Gary S. Vasilash > gsv@autofeldguide.com
Inside the XL1
p The VW XL1 in downtown Wolfsburg. The future is now.
Wolfsburg is a company town. Ford
is to Dearborn as Volkswagen is to
Wolfsburg.
So presumably, if you're an inhabitant of the German city, chances are
you'd be slightly blasé when it comes
to seeing new VW models in and
around town.
Yet when I rolled up in front of the
ultra-futuristic Phaeno Science
30
Center designed by Zaha Hadid in an
ultra-futuristic production Volkswagen
XL1, the number of people who
swarmed around the car was nothing
short of remarkable in itself. Clearly,
the X1 is a car that is anything but
ordinary.
A word about "production." There have
been 50 XL1s built so far. They're
going to be building an additional 200
units of the diesel plug-in hybrid car,
which has a combined fuel effciency
of 0.9 l/100 km (261 mpg). So the
entire production run can pretty much
ft in a parking lot at the Autostadt in
Wolfsburg.
To be sure, the XL1 isn't a vehicle
that VW plans to turn into a people's
car. VW engineer Eike Feldhusen, an
engineer who works on the vehicle,
admits that it is "a special car," one
that the company is using primarily