VW ECORACER, 2005
It’s quite funny to look back at concept cars from, say, the Fifties and snigger at the sort of advanced tech they were hawking. “Nuclearpowered family cars,” you guffaw. “Not a chance!” And yet even as recently as 2005 the clean diesel engine was the ghost of Christmas future. It’s easy to forget that until Volkswagen spiked the punch the low-emission party was fuelled by the stuff from the black pump.
Parsimonious diesels were all the rage at the time in the Volkswagen Group – Audi had its futuristic A2 hatch and Volkswagen itself had popped the Lupo 3L diesel city car on sale in Germany, so called because of its incredibly impressive three litres per 100km fuel consumption (94mpg). But neither of these was particularly sexy, so it was the job of the EcoRacer concept to titivate the car buying masses with its sharp lines, fancy CFRP bodywork and techy weight reductions.
The EcoRacer’s 1.5-litre 4cyl diesel was almost nostalgic for VW – it had engines of that layout in the first-gen Golf and Passat back in the mid-Seventies, while the modern 1.5 teased in the 2005 concept saw action in the MkV Polo and is still around today in a number of models for developing countries. Its 1.6-litre replacement, codenamed EA189, would later become famous for some of its sneakier technological innovations.
The EcoRacer’s 134bhp and 184lb ft of torque might seem like fairly meagre outputs for something with sporting pretensions, but it all makes a bit more sense when you consider that the concept car weighed in at 850kg. The 0–62mph run would take 6.2secs and its top speed was 143mph, all while managing an impressive consumption (in the more sedate official lab tests, of course) of 83mpg. Now there’s a future we could get behind.
The roof provided the real headlinegrabbing hijinks, though – the EcoRacer was a real three-in-one special, like a petrol station torch. You had your normal coupe as standard, with a breadvan-style roof extension for added aerodynamics. That could be removed, if you wanted to put a luggage rack over the bootlid. The main roof section was removable to create a roadster, while the windscreen could also be jettisoned in order to create a speedster for the full flies-in-your-teeth experience.
The EcoRacer was shuffled off to the great warehouse in the sky and Volkswagen’s tease of a fun to drive, eco-oriented mass production car has never been realised. Its XL1 of 2013 was a 0.8-litre diesel-powered PHEV, but at £120,000 that wagen was only for the rich volk. Another useful life lesson from concept cars of history – the future might occasionally look bright, but it doesn’t always last for long.