Wolfsburg / London, April 3, 2014 – The world’s most fuel-efficient hybrid car, the Volkswagen XL1*, will go on display in the Design Museum in London alongside other examples of design excellence and Designs of the Year award nominees from a range of disciplines from March 26 until August 25. Now in its seventh year, the Designs of the Year exhibition gathers together cutting-edge innovation and original talent, showcasing the very best in global Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphic, Product and Transport design.

The Volkswagen XL1 features in the Transport category, and was nominated for the exhibition by Andrew Nahum, whose publications include ‘Fifty Cars That Changed The World’. Designed by a team led by Klaus Bischoff, Head of Design for the Volkswagen brand, the XL1 is a limited series production two-seater car that explores the limits of energy efficiency for a road-legal production vehicle.

The design brief for the XL1 was to produce a ‘one liter’ car – that is to say, a car that uses just one litre of fuel per 100 km, equivalent to 282 miles per gallon. The resulting vehicle uses just 0.9 litres per 100 km, or 313 mpg, and this high mpg figure correlates to a very low carbon dioxide emissions value of just 21 g/km.

To achieve this target fuel consumption figure, the XL1 was aerodynamically optimized, adopting the classic ‘tear drop’ shape and utilizing innovations such as removing traditional wing mirrors and replacing them with small cameras called e-Mirrors which transmit exterior images to interior displays. With a drag coefficient of 0.189 the XL1 can maintain 100 km/h on a level road in still air using just 8.4 PS.