Volkswagen have claimed their new car will get 313mpg - meaning a 100 mile trip will cost just £2.30.

Volkswagen to produce the world's most fuel efficient car with a record-breaking 313mpg

Driving this environmentally friendly car means the lightweight vehicle would cost only around £1.40 to travel 62 miles.

 

Volkswagen have announced the production of the world's most fuel efficient car - designed like a futuristic motor and capable of an incredible 313MPG.

The Volkswagen XL1 with its super sleek design is powered by a miniscule 800cc diesel engine and a separate electric motor and battery pack.

This will give the plug-in hybrid a 0-62mph time of 12.2 seconds and a top speed limited to a modest 99mph.

But the XL1 is not about sporty performance but environmentally-friendly driving - with Volkswagen claiming it will be capable of a record breaking 313miles per gallon.


Driving this environmentally friendly car means the lightweight vehicle would cost only around £1.40 to travel 62 miles.

It can also cover a distance of up to 31 miles in all-electric mode where it emits zero carbon dioxide.

Overall emissions are a mere 21g/km - less than a quarter of the amount produced by the famous ultra-green Toyota Prius.

Despite weighing just 795kg, the XL1 is anything but flimsy with VW building the two-seater out of lightweight but tough carbon fibre.

Volkswagen confirmed it will build an initial 50 models at the company’s Osnabrueck factory in Germany alongside its Golf Cabriolet and Porsche Boxster.

But the firm refused to give any indication on how much the aerodynamic two-seater will cost.

The XL1 will be on show at next month’s Geneva Motor Show with the first models produced by the end of 2013.

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Sony Has To Raise Its Game

Rumour round-up: What to expect from Sony's console launch

Tech industry insiders offer up their opinion on what the new PlayStation might do.

 Sony is set to unveil the successor to its best-selling games console on Wednesday night - but tech gossip is divided about whether the new machine can recapture PlayStation's glory days.

The internet is unsurprisingly awash with rumours of what we can expect from the machine, which arrives at a time when traditional home console gaming is falling in popularity.

They include reports of a £300 price-tag for the PlayStation 4 in the UK - and the suggestion that PS4 will connect to, smartphones, tablets and the PS Vita handheld.

Other suggestions include it being controlled by a mobile phone or featuring the classic DualShock controller but with a touchpad attached.

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And pictures 'leaked' or imagined by fans put its design as anything from an Orb to a more traditional-looking but thinner and smaller box.

One rumour also suggested it will feature a way to capture in-game footage of up to 15 minutes of your own action with a single record button, enabling you to upload the mini movie straight to the internet.

There is also expected to be social network compatibility for Facebook and Twitter, far faster processing chips and top-of-the-range graphics including support for new Ultra High-Definition or 4K TV sets, which Sony champions.

The PS4 should also run off some sort of cloud-server allowing owners to instantly download the latest big hitting games - potentially in chapters as they are needed - rather than having to buy them as discs from the shops.

But after sluggish sales for Nintendo's new WiiU along with falling demand for games for PS3 and Xbox 360, many now wonder if the golden age of console gaming has had its day, with users migrating to cheaper app-based fun.

Industry experts say there is still enough of an audience for Sony to tap into but admit the Japanese giant will need to come up with something different and special at a reasonable price, especially with Microsoft's Xbox 720 replacement for the Xbox 360 incoming too.

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According to Michael French, Editor-in-Chief of games industry trade mag MCV, the PS4 needs to deliver to rescue the genre.

He said: "New hardware and new software can help the industry not just reclaim some attention lost to mobile and tablet games, but broadly raise its game out of the doldrums.

"Hopefully we will get a clear picture, or at least a good glimpse, at what the successor to the PlayStation 3 will look like. I think we can spend to long speculating on if it has streaming games, download games or an open publishing platform.

"The most important things for the industry and consumers are if it has a good selection of games and is affordable. Games retail has faced some pretty slow trading over the last 12 months, thanks in no part to a lack of excitement and imagination from the current generation of consoles."

Just before midnight UK time tomorrow (Wednesday) we should have a better answer with Sony kicking off its press conference at 11pm GMT and Yahoo! News UK will have all the latest launch information direct from our correspondent in America.

Top Technology Trends for 2013

In the meantime, games industry analyst Nicholas Lovell, of gamesbrief.com, believes the massive amount of entertainment content currently available to us could prove tricky for Sony.

He explained: "We now live in an era of abundance, where there are more games and content than we can ever possibly consume. Some of these are free, some are very expensive, but we have lots of choice.

"We've seen how that has played out on PS3 and Xbox 360: boxed sales are down massively from their 2008 peak, THQ and GAME have gone bust and yet almost every year Rockstar or Activision release a game that breaks all records, selling tens of millions of units.

"The issue with the next generation of console is not whether hobbyist gamers (meaning people who would define gaming as their hobby) will buy it: it’s how Sony will make up the lost revenue, both in hardware revenue and the royalty revenue generated from every game sold for its platform, from the more casual users who have been distracted away to other more accessible platforms, particularly the phone and tablet."

He added longer-term thinking that allows players to make multiple purchases in-game over months and years will be key to a successful PS4.

Mr Lovell said: "My hope is Sony creates a platform that will enable publishers and developers to experiment widely with different business models. They want to move away from a business model that involves a single box once every 12 or 24 months and instead have an ongoing revenue stream.

"If Sony think they are producing a product for the mass market, where publishers will succeed or fail based on increased volume of products they sell, they will be in trouble.

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Top Technology Trends for 2013

 

Giant tablet PCs, motion sensors and 3D printers - they're all on the cards for the next 12 months.

Class of 2013: The 10 tech names to watch out for in the next few months

So who are the companies set for success this year?

When Nokia recently announced it would not pay a dividend to shareholders for the first time in recorded history, it was a shock for many to hear the Finnish mobile phone maker was flagging.

Once the darling of the mobile industry, there was a time when it produced all the must-have handsets. But over recent years has fallen down the pecking order, surpassed by new rivals such as Apple, Samsung and HTC.

Even BlackBerry is suffering, with its new BB10 operating software a last-ditch attempt to regain ground surrendered to the smartphone competition. 

Other well-known names across the whole of the technology industry have now either faded or all but disappeared - including Compaq, the Sony Ericsson brand, Motorola, Kodak digital cameras and Polaroid among others.

But it's not all bad news in the tech space. This week portable computer maker Asus announced it was gaining momentum having just sold more than one million notebooks, netbooks and tablets in the UK in 2012 - a whopping 176% growth year-on-year.

So who are the other companies set for success in 2013. Here are 10 tech and web names to watch out for.

Lenovo
The Chinese computer hardware company has invested heavily in making a series of innovative hybrid products with the Windows 8 operating system on board. These include the Yoga, a laptop that flips 360 degrees to become a tablet and the Thinkpad Helix, a tablet that can slot directly into a keyboard to become a laptop.

Huawei
Now the largest telecommunications equipment maker in the world, Huawei provides back-end technology for the mobile industry and had made many mobiles and smartphones badged up by UK networks as their own. Now thought it is branching into its own handsets and devices such as 3G and 4G portable internet dongles, rightly becoming a big player in its own right. 

ZTE

The fourth largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world is another that made devices for others to label up. But its own consumer products look set to compete with the likes of rival Huawei and other big mobile names with the firm expected to unveil a handset based on the Mozilla Firefox internet browser later this month at the Mobile World Congress expo in Barcelona. 

Qualcomm
You might not have heard of them but the company's technology powers a wide-range of mobile communication devices and smartphones with patents on a range of 4G technology. Its mobile-based Snapdragon chips are contained in everything from sat-navs to the latest handsets and tablets. The work done by Qualcomm behind-the-scenes will have a big say on how fast and powerful a range of future devices will be.

Leap Motion
We've gone from physical keyboards to touchscreens on our tech but movement-sensing is certainly the next big thing. While Microsoft and Sony have weaved some into their games consoles and are sure to conjure even more motion-sensing magic with the next Xbox and PlayStation, Leap Motion are quietly crafting a whole new movement so-to-speak. The company's software and little control box can sense individual hand and finger gestures to change the way you interact with the technology around you such as computers.

MakerBot
With the Replicator 2 desktop 3D printer, MakerBot look set to bring three-dimensional printing to the masses. It's certainly not cheap at around £1,500 but it's the most affordable starting point for what is certainly set to be a fun "professional" hobby. It's capable of far more colours and detailed designs than its closest competitor the Cubify Cube, a more fun-aimed £1,000 option that can bought for the home and will print funky coloured objects within minutes.

MySpace
This original social network was once the darling of the internet until its own fall from grace. Now it has been "rebuilt, redesigned and reinvented" after being bought, in part, by megastar Justin Timberlake. It still has a major focus on songs, bands and tune discovery with an integrated streaming music player and a side-scrolling rather than top-down layout. It is now in a public beta testing phase with the older version still available.

MySpace is back

Branch/Medium
Created by Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone, the two independent sites can be accessed through your Twitter login. The first aims to "bring the intimacy of a dinner party conversation" to the internet with chats not limited to 140 characters and, it hopes, with people that matter to you and the subject itself. You can 'branch' off and have sub-conversations without ruining the flow of the original thread. Medium is still very much in its early stages and is aimed around online publishing - creating collections of thoughts and images into a system that promotes and shares, ranking for quality rather than the most popular.

Vine
This video-sharing site has just been launched by Twitter and is the mini-movie version of the short and sweet social network. Instead of having 140 characters to write with, Vine offers you six seconds in which to tell your story with film and sound. It is available via an iOS app with other platforms on the way. A similar system is Viddy for iOS and Android, which restricts movies to 15 seconds.

Square
Another former Twitter big cheese Jack Dorsey is behind this mobile payment company. Having proved popular in America, it launched in Canada late last year and the UK could prove another successful market should it arrive here in 2013. Using an iOS and Android app, anyone can take credit card payments via their smartphone attached to a tiny swipe device provided by Square. With a small fee for transactions and no other charges, it could revolutionise life for small businesses and ultimately save them money and increasing their profits.

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