The Mission Efficiency is a Volkswagen, which is worth establishing early, because a teardrop coupe with covered rear wheels, frameless glass and no door handles you can actually see reads more like a Jetsons prop than anything Wolfsburg has put on a stand this decade.

It is also, as of this week, the most aerodynamic road-approved car ever built.

The 0.158 drag coefficient that earns it the title sits well clear of a Mercedes EQS at 0.20 and a Tesla Model 3 at 0.23, and it beats the carbon fibre XL1 Volkswagen built when Ferdinand Piëch was still chasing his one-litre car, which also stopped at 0.19. Frontal area does half the work, and at 2.08 square metres there is not much of the Mission Efficiency to push through the air in the first place.

Volkswagen Mission Efficiency

Volkswagen proved it on a road rather than a rolling chart, running the thing 1,278.36km from Wolfsburg to Vienna via Poznań and Olomouc with the 54.9kWh battery charged only once along the way, and rolling into Austria with 164km of range still showing.

Average speed was 67.72km/h and consumption came in at 6.89kWh per 100km, or 7.51kWh once charging losses are counted. A separate run at a constant 68km/h with the air conditioning off dropped that to 6.48kWh, and Record Institute Germany certified three records in its category for near-production, everyday four seat EVs, being the drag figure, that 6.48kWh ideal run, and the title of most economical near production EV in its class.

For the Gen Zers who have no idea who George Jetson is.

What makes the numbers interesting is how boring the hardware is. Underneath sits the same MEB+ platform, the same 99kW front motor and essentially the same battery pack Volkswagen is putting into the ID. Polo, so nothing exotic is doing the heavy lifting.

The shape is doing all of it. Volkswagen stretched the wheelbase 100mm past the Polo’s, pulled the rear track in by 170mm to taper the tail, clad the rear wheels and the entire underbody, sank the door handles into the skin, and patented a set of deflectors that sit inside all four wheels to stop turbulence building in the arches. Three slats in the lower bumper open asymmetrically depending on what the cooling system needs.

All of which pays better the harder you push. Above 80km/h the prototype uses more than 30 per cent less energy than a standard ID. Polo, and at 140km/h it draws roughly what that Polo needs at 100km/h, which is the sort of maths that would make a Sydney to Melbourne run almost free.

Volkswagen Mission Efficiency

Where the aero ran out of answers, Volkswagen took weight out instead. Interior panelling was lightened, the speaker system was deleted in favour of a portable Bluetooth box, and a smartphone or tablet does the job of the infotainment screen.

A 370W photovoltaic array in the glass roof and bootlid feeds the on-board electrics, and depending on season and weather it can add up to 30km of real range a day.

Australians should temper the enthusiasm. The ID. Polo that donates all this hardware still is not locked in for local showrooms, with Volkswagen Australia executives telling CarExpert that our appetite for SUVs makes the case for a small electric hatch difficult, and the Mission Efficiency itself is a prototype nobody will be able to buy.

It would have landed in the same fight as the Chinese EVs already undercutting Europe on price, which is part of why the sums are hard.

Volkswagen Mission Efficiency

It matters anyway, because every carmaker has arrived at the same conclusion at once. Ford is shaving drag off its next-generation electric ute, Mercedes, Audi and Porsche are all fighting over the same tenths, and as Beijing made painfully clear this year, a kilowatt-hour saved by shape is a kilowatt-hour of battery nobody has to pay for.

The harder question is whether anyone wants to own the result.

Efficiency reads brilliantly on a spec sheet and poorly in a driveway, and a car engineered to disturb as few air molecules as possible will never have the presence Australians keep paying for, which is the trap Volkswagen has fallen into before. It has won the physics argument by some margin. Winning the one in the showroom is a different story entirely.

Watch this space.

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