'We will be Smaller and Kinder' - How Luvly is Challenging the Auto Industry - CEO, Håkan Lutz

Everybody wants to be the 'biggest and baddest'. Companies want to sell the most products and make the most money. But this competition has led to overconsumption and vast amounts of waste. 

Luvly has a very different mindset, and the Swedish company represents a solution to a larger societal problem. As stated on its website: 'Luvly will never be bigger and badder. We will be smaller and kinder'.

The Luvly O is a lightweight, electric vehicle (EV) that can go up to 90 km/h. The idea is to use little material to create a vehicle that produces little waste, ultimately reducing the environmental and financial cost.

“By building with very little materials, we avoid a lot of waste in production, we can build a vehicle that consumes very little energy… we can build a vehicle that, thanks to the low energy consumption, can make do with very small batteries, and very small batteries you can easily swap manually, so it’s this circle of life,” Håkan Lutz, the CEO and Head Inventor at Luvly, tells Auto Futures.

Luvly Technology

The Luvly O is special to its core, literally.

“It’s the core technology that really provides a difference because we build it in an unorthodox way, this way that we’ve patented, where we build a chassis… out of fibres and plastics basically,” explains Lutz.

The chassis is the strong, horizontal structure of a vehicle that keeps everything in place. Similar to a formula racing car, the Luvly O has a chassis built from sandwich composite materials, which are very strong for their weight.

When a regular car crashes, its whole structure crumbles and folds. That is how the energy from the crash is absorbed. With a formula racing car and with the Luvly O, there is a safety cell around the passenger, to which all of the other parts are bolted, and this safety cell doesn’t crumble.

“Instead, you have particular, separate parts that only have one function, and it is to be destroyed if you crash. So those parts are destroyed, and since we build very light vehicles for slow speeds, we can actually utilise plastic foam as the…energy absorption zones, or EAZ, so that this safety cell around the passenger remains intact,” explains Lutz.

The traditional way of building with sandwich composites is costly and slow, but Luvly has come up with a methodology to make that production faster and cheaper.

“The technology behind the company is a brainchild of mine,” says Lutz.

Reducing Cost, Reducing Environmental Impact

The Luvly O is all about reduction. It’s a vehicle that is light enough to qualify as a non-car, but it is completely safe and available at an affordable price.

Lutz began to conceptualise and develop Luvly in 2006, which was very early to convince people to drive in anything other than SUVs. “There has been a long wait to see the market come to a point where they want light vehicles. That has been a major obstacle, that sort of acceptance of the necessity and the beauty of changing from cars to lighter vehicles,” says Lutz.

Now, Lutz hopes to get this technology out to as many producers and consumers as possible. Luvly is offering to licence the entire package for anybody that wants to produce the vehicles.

“From an economic point of view, as a producer, you might want to produce the biggest, fanciest, most expensive vehicle that is possible to sell. That was never the intention,” explains Lutz. “The whole area where we are involved is about looking at the waste in society, specifically for us, the waste in personal transportation and sort of refuse to accept that as a given, because it’s not.”

Safety For All

“Maybe I’m sticking my neck out here, but the way we buy cars today is like we’re afraid, like you need to defend yourself against the big, bad world around you, and you need to show that you’re big and tough. Whereas the problem is that we’re acting big and tough.”

Normally, we consider a vehicle to be safe if the driver is well-protected, but the “big and tough cars,” like large SUVs, are more dangerous for pedestrians and people in traffic. Not to mention the significantly larger impact SUVs have on the environment.

“It’s safe for me, but it isn’t safe for you,” Lutz explains.

As consumers, we’ve tried bigger and badder. It may be time to try smaller and kinder.

“We really make an effort to deliver as much as possible, with as little as possible. Always,” concludes Lutz.