Volkswagen XL1 wins Designs of the Year award
By Jamie White – Head of Communications
Volkswagen XL1, the world’s most fuel-efficient hybrid car, has been named winner of the Transport category in the annual Designs of the Year Awards.
The car is one of 76 designs in seven categories which are on display at the Design Museum in London until August 25th.
The innovative XL1 will now go on to compete for the Design of the Year 2014 award against the winners of the other categories – Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphic, Product – with the overall winner announced at an event on June 30th.
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 design.
Head of Design for the Volkswagen brand, Klaus Bischoff, and his team, produced the limited series production two-seater car that explores the limits of energy efficiency for a road-legal production vehicle.
The design brief for the Volkswagen XL1 was to produce a ‘one litre’ car – a car that uses 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.
Members of the public can have their say on Designs of the Year in the Visitor Vote, which allows visitors to the Design Museum to pick their favourite design from the exhibition. New for 2014 is the Social Vote which sees two nominations fight it out each day through the exhibition’s online Social Vote platform. Broadcast to over one million of the Design Museum’s Twitter and Facebook followers, the Social Vote allows people from all over the world to participate in Designs of the Year.
Mystery Shopping and Performance Improvement company, Douglas Stafford, provides Volkswagen with a tailored and bespoke nationwide mystery shopping programme to include Telephone Mystery Shopping, Email Mystery Shopping and Video Mystery Shopping, along with specialist Performance Coaching.
