Nowadays, there are some campaigns against VW's environment concern. When all these things happened, I remembered a car from 1999! VW Lupo 3L; this car was introduced at 1999 and achieved 3 lt of petrol consumption per 100 kilometres! Sounds crazy but it achieved this crazy figure. If you don't use lt per km scale, it is 94 MPG!
This car had a 1,2 lt turbo diesel engine with 61 hp, aerodynamic design, low weight materials (whole was 830 kg) and automatic transmission. And it was capable of achieving 1000km with 34 lt of diesel! It was creating only 79gr/km CO2 on 1999, twelve years ago! But at those years, people were not concerned about CO2 or environment and the demand was too weak. As VW is a company to make profit, they stopped the production. Honestly, they did everything to sustain production until 2005 but customers did not wish to buy an environmental small car! 3L Lupo had a wrong schedule!
By the way, in automotive industry low weight materials mean one thing. It is more expensive! It is not cheap to make a car weight less. Lower weight means more composite components and this means complicated manufacturing. And this leads to increase manufacturing costs. Basically, making something lighter is more expensive than the standard production.
Before criticising an automotive company, please think twice and also consider the demand of consumers to products! It is not always possible to sustain a product with a very low demand. If you want to see the efficiency improvement in automotive industry just check the consumption of a vehicle in 2000 and now! You will see the difference.
And I am sure that VW will reveal a 1 lt vehicle soon to market.
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VW
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