Volkswagen Twin up! and e-up! 2013 Review - International

Volkswagen is nothing if not determined, and it’s absolutely determined that it will be the world’s biggest seller of electric and hybrid cars by 2018.

As a Group containing Audi, SEAT, Skoda, VW and even Porsche, it will have 14 electric and hybrid cars by the middle of 2015, and amongst the first to test the waters will be an all-electric version of the baby up! and a plug-in hybrid variant dubbed the Twin up!.

Neither car will be cheap, with the e-up! relying on generous government subsidies in Europe to bring it to even within the range of “gee-that’s-expensive”, while the fearfully complex Twin up! will only be a hair cheaper.

Like its bigger brother, the plug-in hybrid Golf, the Twin up! will be capable of 50km of pure-electric, zero-emission running, while the electric up! can stretch out to 160km of driving between charges.

Volkswagen e-up!
It’s a widely held belief that you need quite a bit of room for batteries in a small electric car, and everybody from BMW to Nissan and Renault has developed a unique chassis to stash all those Duracells and still provide some space for people.

Volkswagen hasn’t done that. Effectively, it has done what Mercedes-Benz did for two generations of the A-Class. It pre-engineered the up!’s architecture to swallow the batteries sometime down the track.

Unlike Mercedes (which wasted all that pre-engineering by failing to commercialise an electric car), Volkswagen has actually used its pre-engineering.

This car, the e-up!, has not been designed just for Yorkshire. It will be a full-line production model, and it won’t be cheap.

Electric power will push the baby car’s pricetag out towards €26,900 in Germany, which is double what they ask for this bodyshell when it’s stuffed with an internal combustion engine. The up! is being advertised in Italy at the moment at €10,990.

But you do get an impressive thing for all that money. Volkswagen is claiming running costs of just €3.02 per 100km for the e-up!, based on charging costs in Germany. So you’ll only need to drive about 1.6 million kilometres in an e-up! to break even against a diesel version.

The upside is that it’s a quieter, cleaner city car and in Europe that means it can be driven in any city, at any time of any day without attracting a fee. An increasing number of European cities are also planning zero-emission zones, too, and the e-up! fills that bill nicely.

Like its bigger Golf electric stablemate, the e-up! has had some visual tweaks, especially around the front, to give it an aero edge as well as some individual pieces of design (like its DRLs).

It also gets the up!’s best alloy wheels, a new, lower-energy air conditioner and a multi-media system pre-loaded for maps +, and it also boasts a hands-free phone system. Another thing, slightly perplexing, is that it gets heated seats (cold weather is a killer for batteries and if it’s cold enough to need heated seats, it’s probably too cold for an electric car).

Like its bigger Golf electric stablemate, it fills its floor and boot area with 18.7kWh worth of lithium-ion batteries and its nose with electric motor. Its odd, then, to note that its cabin and luggage area look exactly the same as they do in the internal combustion version.

There’s a 60kW permanent excited synchronous electric motor up front, turning the front wheels through a single-speed gearbox. This delivers 210Nm of torque, and it delivers it immediately.

Don’t expect it to be mega quick, though. It isn’t. The 230kg battery pack helps the e-up! to a kerb weight of 1139kg. Given the size of the car, the 204-cell battery pack is enormous, measuring 1.7 metres long, 1.1 metres wide and, at its thickest, it’s 303mm high.

One thing VW has paid attention to with its electric push is making its customers familiar with every single control surface. That means you just turn the key, wait for the accelerator needle to swing back and forward through its arc once, pull the gear lever into drive, let the park brake off and accelerate away.

The up! has never been quick and it’s even less quick now. It’s going to take more than 12 seconds to hit 100km/h (VW quotes 12.4, but the decimal place is a bit redundant when the first number is 12) and it has a 130km/h top speed. But neither of those numbers are really the point.

It is far, far stronger than that between 0 and 60km/h (4.9 seconds) and, let’s face it, an electric car is for the city so that makes a lot more sense, and is a lot more important.

It’s easily strong enough to nip in and out of thick traffic or to jump away from the lights, using its insta-torque, to get into another lane when you’ve made a navigational error. And it does it all quietly and calmly, with the absence of noise delivering a sense of calm through the cabin. Even at a constant 60km/h, you can actually hear the suspension moving and the tyres fizzing over stones in the bitumen.

Spinning at up to 12,000rpm, the electric motor gives its full 60kW output on full throttle, but only delivers 40kW on a constant throttle (though the torque is there whenever it’s required).

It also seems to ride with a firmer setup than the standard cars and it certainly does share their slightly light on-road feel. The springs might be firmer, but the car, with all that battery weight lying flat in the floor, feels far more planted with a lower centre of gravity.

The steering isn’t going to kid anybody that they’ve stepped into a baby supercar, but it’s light and easy to use. The brake pedal, however, is going to take some getting used to.

As with all electric cars, the e-up! uses the first part of the brake pedal’s movement to turn the electric motor into a generator, recharging the battery by making the motor apply resistance to slow the car down. Brake harder than this initial zone and you find the normal brake calipers squeezing the four-wheel discs, but between those two zones is a moment that is still lacking integration. In short, the change between the electrical bit of the brake and the mechanical bit feels funny.

It works, though, which is the main thing. It works in more ways than one, because you can work the gear lever laterally (in what would normally be the +/- gearshift channel) to increase or decrease the electric harvesting.

In the stock default mode, easing your foot off the accelerator pedal lets the e-up! ‘coast’, with everything disconnected to save fuel. Flick the gearlever once and it moves to its D1 mode, which regenerates gently when you lift off the accelerator pedal. D2 does the same thing harder (and lights up the brake lights, just in case an errant follower doesn’t spot what you’re doing), and it gets progressively more aggressive until D4.

Beyond that, you can pull the gearshifter back in the B mode (where a normal S would be), and that can regenerate so aggressively that the e-up! harvests 40kW at 100km/h. And it feels like you’ve stabbed at the brakes quite firmly.

It’s actually a very refined little machine, with a level of structural integrity that seems at odds with its flimsy external dimensions and doors that don’t quite close with the traditional VW thud.

But the really impressive thing is that the interior is just about the same as it is in the standard up!. No compromises whatsoever then, with the small exceptions of an outrageously high price and limited range.

Volkswagen Twin-up!
Volkswagen isn’t building many of its XL1 plug-in hybrid eco supercars. How many customers can there really be for a wacky coupe that has specifications that are half supercar, half environmental adventure.

That’s mostly because the price tag is up over €100,000, but that brings with it a carbon-fibre tub and skin, mid-engined layout, featherweight everything and scores 0.9L/100km on the NEDC cycle.

But you can’t make money on €100,000 coupes that take 12.7 seconds to get to 100km/h. You might make money, VW realised, if you took the hybrid powertrain out of the XL1 and moved it to the front of the four-door up! body.

It’s still not going to be cheap (with VW hinting at around €22,000 - €24,000 when the “concept car” goes on sale late next year. But it’s a whole lot cheaper than its technology-leader stable mate, and it’s a touch cheaper than the all-electric e-up!

More practical, too, with four seats instead of two, more powerful and a whole lot heavier, weighing 1205kg instead of 795kg.

The odd thing is that the more powerful, heavier, more practical twin up! isn’t much thirstier, posting an NEDC number of 1.1L/100km and still delivering 50km of all-electric, zero-emission range.

It does this by combining a 0.8-litre, 35kW, twin-cylinder diesel engine with a 35kW electric motor (it has had a 15kW power upgrade in the move from the XL1), an 8.6kWh lithium ion battery pack in the boot, and a 33 litre diesel tank.

The front-drive machine is capable of running on pure electric power, diesel power or a combination of both, punching the 55kW of system power through a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission.

And while VW has some glitches to iron out in the transition between the diesel and electric motors, the Twin up! works very, very well. And, as a bonus, it delivers an astonishing total range of 1053km.

Like the Golf plug-in hybrid, the Twin up! can be run in a range of modes, from pure electric, pure diesel or a combination of both. It can use its diesel engine to charge up its batteries, too.

First up, the Twin up! isn’t exactly spritely. It takes three seconds longer than the XL1’s 12.7 seconds to reach 100km/h. It’s quicker than it seems to get to lower benchmarks, like 60km/h.

Its electric mode is as calm as the e-up! and when the little diesel kicks over, it’s a whole lot calmer than it is in the XL1, even if it does still sound like a woodpecker trying to break through a sheet of corrugated iron. It gets better as you cruise with it, but it’s still louder than anything else wearing a VW badge.

You can always get the diesel to kick in to add some oomph to the electric powertrain, but you have a choice of running it in electric, hybrid, hybrid recharge or a sportier combination of everything. And, like the e-up!, you can choose from different levels of recharging the battery pack.

Unlike the e-up!, you can also program the hybrid to hang on to as much electric charge as possible so you can run as a zero-emission car later in the trip.

It rides well, too, with the extra weight of the batteries seeming to help the stability and security.

All in all, it’s a car that brings the XL1’s big jump into the future into a timeframe of closer to 18 months. It makes sense in every way but the price and, with the entire thing built out of modular parts that fit into every up! derivative, you can expect it to be spread throughout the VW Group sooner rather than later.

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