Sweden’s new car brand Luvly is about tiny but safe

The Luvly brand is near to producing its microcar O, which can ship as a flatpack and puts a strong accent on safety. With a length of 2,7 meters and a weight of five times less than a regular battery-powered car, the Luvly O joins the growing ‘cuddly’ category of tiny cars like the Citroën Ami, Microlino, or Silence.

CEO of Luvly, Håkan Lutz, doesn’t call it a car. Instead, he invented the acronym LUV for it, short for Light Urban Vehicle – an intelligent reference to the brand’s name.

Light it is. With a weight of only 380 kilograms and dimensions of 2,7 meters in length, a width of 1,5 meters, and a height of 1,5 meters, the microcar aims at the smallest footprint possible. This is because the company wants to have the most significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the size and needs to a minimum.

Carry-on battery packs

As such, the battery-powered Luvly O consumes 6 kWh per 100 kilometers, roughly three times better than some of the best-performing BEVs. It can handle a range of 100 kilometers. There’s no info on the battery pack’s capacity, but unlike most competitors, the O relies on swapping technology. And we should say packs because there are two of them, and they each weigh 15 kilograms.

There’s some clever thinking in that split. With charging infrastructure rapidly becoming a soar point, owners of the Luvly O can easily carry the packs indoors and charge them at home.

We’ve witnessed this solution at Silence, imported by the Astara group in Belgium. But, of course, you can still charge the pack at a regular charging pillar. It doesn’t look like Luvly will roll out a propriety network or swapping stations like Nio, at least not in the first phase.

‘Slow Formula racing tech’

Rooted in Sweden, the company stresses that tiny doesn’t equal unsafe. The brand’s website claims the deployed sandwich composite safety shell and the energy absorbers make the microcar safer than its competitors. It’s “slow formula racing tech”, the brand funnily states.

The Luvly O can transport two people, but with a boot of 267 liters, there’s room for some shopping bags and bringing home your supermarket list. Undoubtedly, last-mile delivery companies will be ringing the bell at Luvly to develop a cargo version. The good news is that this is already on the agenda, as the modular build allows us to assemble different body types with the same components quickly.

For intracity journeys

The quadricycle can run on highways at 90 km/hour, though this is outside of its playing field. Lutz adds that intracity journeys are the target, not the daily forensic habits of city-dwellers. However, with urbanization rising, these microcars’ territory is also expanding.

Another edge over rivals is the price. Luvly claims the car will cost around €10 000 euros, which is a fair bit cheaper than the Microlino (€14 900) or Silence S04 (€13 950) but more expensive than the Citroën AMI (€7 790).

Shipped in flatpacks

And what about the flatpack approach? Sounds like IKEA, no? Luvly can transport the car’s components in a flat box, making it possible to store twenty of them in a container. Usually, around four units fit in a container or are shipped in a specially designed roll-on roll-off ship (which aren’t needed in the case of the Luvly).

Final assembly isn’t in the hands of the end-user, though. So Luvly aims at micro-factories in different regions to take care of that. Roll-out will start in Stockholm, with cities like Milan and Paris further down the wishlist.