Source: The Good News Network
It isn’t likely to be your next home DIY project, but there is a company that’s looking to turn IKEA’s flat-packed furniture design into cars.
The Swedish vehicle start-up Luvly is finishing up its inaugural model, the O, which is designed to be so light and modular that it can be flat-packed to save thousands of tons of emissions from vehicle shipping.
Designed for urban commuting, the Luvly O will have two 35-pound battery packs that can be switched out to extend its small range of just 62 miles. With a top speed of 55 miles per hour, the car is 37 inches shorter than the already-small Fiat 500.
It has also been designed with a key safety feature to fortify the drivers of these small cars against crashes.
“For light vehicles to compete with cars, and hopefully out-compete cars, they must be safe. People will not accept that you switch from driving an SUV to driving what is essentially a scooter with a shell,” Håkan Lutz, CEO and co-founder of the car firm, told CNN.
Taking inspiration from Formula-1 cars’ light yet rigid aluminum chassis, Luvly has created a dual layer of foam on the outside and inside of the vehicle’s skeleton to help absorb kinetic force.
Priced at €10,000 ($10,500), the car isn’t flat-packed and shipped to you, but to an authorized dealer for assembly, but Lutz told CNN that it isn’t just the car they’ll be sending to other firms.
They will be licensing their patented flat-packed technology to big automobile manufacturers in the hope that the design will catch on and that they might even continue to innovate the concept and drive it forward toward a more sustainable future.
“We don’t envision that we will be major producers of vehicles, but we anticipate we will be minor producers of vehicles, to advocate for and develop the technology,” says Lutz. “Despite wanting to license this to others, we also wish to stay on top of the game and be the best at our platform.”
The company claims that the Luvly O is 80% more environmentally friendly to manufacture even than other EVs and that most of the components are recyclable, and can be manufactured from already existing sustainable materials.
