Volkswagen's Think Blue: stay calm, consume less

VW has reinvigorated its Think Blue sustainability website, but the rules for eco-driving remain the same

Volkswagen has announced an overhaul of its Think Blue website, the online face of its sustainability program. The update comes a couple of weeks after the company ran its annual Think Blue media event, testing journalists' ability to drive economically and teaching them how to.

Think Blue is the name the company gives a holistic sustainability regime the company’s press material says “[fosters] environmentally compatible mobility and sustainable individual action”.

Extending through product, process and virtually every facet of corporate strategy, it “aims to make production at Volkswagen plants 25 per cent more environmentally compatible by 2018” against figures from 2010, when it announced its Strategy 2018 growth plan.

In private, the company, along with the rest of Germany’s wealthy, powerful auto industry, has greeted the EU legislature’s mooted fleet emissions target of 95g/km by 2020 with howls of protest. But all know that whether or not they win the argument over that specific figure, dramatic cuts in emissions are a given.

Think Blue is Volkswagen’s acknowledgement of the direction Europe’s political masters are pushing the industry. To make the best of a bad lot, they’ve turned it into a mix of corporate reputation building, product promotion and a public call to action.

The newly remodelled website went live last week. It amounts to a comprehensive statement of what the company is doing at every level of its operation, with suggestions on what drivers can do to both save fuel and help cut emissions.

So what does it actually mean to “Think Blue”?

This is explained in some detail in the new site’s “Blue Behaviour” section which includes driver training with the help of a little monkey figure called Blu. You’ll find it summed up below.

For the journalists at the company’s recent Think Blue economy drive in Sydney, it meant keeping your foot off the pedal to complete a designated loop using as little fuel as possible. Current trip computing technology makes this easy, with marshals setting each vehicle’s trip data to zero at the start line.

Each scribe drove a loop in each of four vehicles: an Up! (1.0-litre petrol; five-speed manual); a Golf 103TSI (1.4-litre petrol; seven-speed DSG); a Passat 130TDI wagon (2.0-litre diesel; six-speed DSG) and a Caddy MaxiVan TDI250 (1.6-litre diesel; five-speed manual). No excuses, no second chances – whatever the marshals read off your trip meter as you crossed the finish line was your score.

Benchmarking was provided by rally man Ed Ordynski. In the days leading up to the event, held this year in Little Bay, on Sydney’s lower eastern beaches, VW officials chose a 20km loop route through Matraville, Maroubra and Botany.

It was picked as a standard example of Aussie metro daytime driving, taking in 40km/h school zones, major intersections, pedestrian crossings, no freeways and just a few hundred metres of top-gear highway conditions. Each driver completed the loop clockwise in two cars, anticlockwise in the other two.

No unfair advantages for our expert here. Ordynski was called in to run through the loop in the same conditions as the scribes – same day of the week, same times of the day.

Ordynski knows the science of engines and how to get the best out of them. Not just in the diabolical gravel-spitting action of the WRC, but at the other end of the spectrum – how to claim every last millimetre of yardage from every last drop.

Nevertheless, in the best show possible of how pure Volkswagen’s organisers kept it, many of the journalists out-frugalled him in the course of the day. For example your correspondent, more your average gonk than champion wheelman, bettered Ordynski in the Up! (3rd out of seven among his group of scribes) and the Caddy (2nd) and matched him in the Passat (4th).

Turbocharging: is it the fuel saver we’re led to believe?

The anomaly was the Golf, in which we turned up a pretty poor last. Why? Some of the blame we can sheet home to those random things we encounter on our suburban travels: here count buses, pedestrians, reverse parkers and an inopportune encounter with traffic-stopping roadworks.

Every time we stop for them, we have to start over, and it’s in getting off the mark and gaining momentum that cars use most of their fuel. Set your fuel consumption readout to instantaneous and watch what happens through first and second gears on take-off. Rocket away from the lights in a decent V8 and the number can pass a litre a kilometre.

But some of it, too, I’d like to lay at the feet of the Golf’s drivetrain technology. Ordynski warned me this was going to be the tricky one. It’s important to flick the DSG over to manual and keep it there, he said.

This makes sense. The idea is to get the thing up through the gears ASAP and keep it as high as possible, preventing it from shifting down automatically.

Turbocharging adds another dimension. In the Think Blue context, the Golf’s modern turbo formula left us unusually nostalgic for those terrible old blowers that stood near idle until exploding into action quite high up the rev range – 2500 or 3000rpm.

Now, with all sorts of effort put into getting the blower active lower down the rev range, it makes the engine more efficient and more pleasant to drive with less lag and a more linear pour of power.

The Golf 103TSI’s 1.4-litre four is a fine example of this. From this very little engine, they’ve managed to extract a peak 250 Newtons from just 1500rpm. That’s a pointer to where the blower spools up proper. It’s great news for those looking to balance out enjoyment at the wheel with decent fuel economy.

But in situations like this, where it’s all economy and no joy, it pays to keep the blower from spooling up. As the boost increases, so does the fuel being fed into the chamber. In the language of Volkswagen’s positive spin: “The advantage: significantly accelerated pressure build-up, which leads to very dynamic performance in downsized engines that have smaller displacements.”

So things get happening very soon after the ECU feels a foot depressing the go-pedal. Which makes it bloody hard to go by Uncle Ed’s suggestion to keep the thing at sub-boost revs.

The disadvantage: that accelerated pressure build-up makes it rather hard to stay off boost. Maybe less so with a manual – but you can’t get the 103TSI with a manual.

The DSG, in true German style, has a mind of its own. A well-sorted mind that knows better than you and therefore simply ignores your +/- shift commands until it’s good to go by its own calculations. This kind of driving might work better with a manual, but like I say... you can’t get a manual with the 103TSI engine.

The Think Blue drive day was all about aberrant driving. In any final analysis, the results (see table below) bode well for any Volkswagen owner looking to drive cheap and clean without too much hard work. Even at worst, most participants came inside – often well inside – the official urban- and combined-cycle figures for each car. Many individual drives even bettered the highway figures.

The exercise proved the unsurprising: that the DSG-turbo marriage has its limitations in these extremes. But for normal day-to-day driving where you’re not sweating on every lost drop, there’s no doubt the official figures and better are well within reach.

Car	Urban	Ex-urb	Comb	Carsales	Ed O	Best
Up!	6.1	4.2	4.9	3.8 (3rd)	4.0	3.2
Golf 103TSI	6.3	4.6	5.2	5.9 (7th)	5.0	4.7
Passat 130TDI	6.4	4.8	5.4	5.1 (4th)	5.1	4.8
Caddy	6.0	4.8	5.2	4.5 (2nd)	5.3	4.2

Think Blue: the basics

Volkswagen provides more detail here, but these are the essentials on how to use less fuel and belch less CO2...

1. Easy on the pedals – accelerator and brake. Think ahead as you drive to reduce stopping and starting.

2. Change up ASAP – drive in the highest possible gear.

3. Coast whenever you can, but not in neutral. Keep the car in gear to make the most of the fuel cutoff systems you’ll find in a number of current models, particularly from European makes. For example with DSG-equipped VWs, it’s more efficient than idling in neutral, which still uses fuel.

4. Stay comfortable, but use your air conditioning and auxiliary heating (eg windscreen and seat heating) in moderation.

5. Keep your tyres pumped up – roll resistance increases as they flatten.

6. Avoid short trips – engines are at their least efficient when they’re cold.

7. Use high-tech, low-friction lubricants.

8. Cut drag – remove roof fittings when you’re not using them, and keep the windows up (balance the latter out with point 4).

9. Lose the ballast – unnecessary cargo costs fuel.

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