Liux’s Big microcar bets on sustainability to take on Chinese rivals
11:33 AM PDT · August 30, 2026
Cars in European cities are smaller than ever. But as Europe’s appetite for microcars has grown, the cute Italian ‘yoghurt pots’ have largely given way to small Chinese EVs. Even Smart, the the iconic ultracompact car brand, has moved manufacturing to China.
Spanish startup Liux thinks it can compete in a crowded market with a tiny electric car built around sustainability.
Following the tracks of the Microlino out of Switzerland, Liux is trying to carve out a place in the market with its upcoming microcar, the Liux Big. The “Big” name is a joke. It is small enough to park at a right angle to the curb; but the name also reflects the oversized ambitions of a team that rarely takes the expected route.
“The idea of a European car does not exist,” Liux co-founder Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros told TechCrunch. Coming from the CEO of a startup whose cars are already making headlines for being “made in Spain,” it was a surprising take — and one that reveals a lot about the company’s priorities.
It is true that Liux opened Spain’s first new car plant in more than 30 years. But as we sat down in its elegant showroom, Espinosa and his co-founder David Sancho said they had concluded that a fully sovereign supply chain is unattainable. Instead, Liux is trying to navigate that reality while keeping sustainability as its north star.
Image Credits: Liux /
Liux’s batteries are not made in Europe, but they are rechargeable at home, including with power generated from solar panels. The car is also meant to be easy to maintain and avoid the faster obsolescence cycles of modern cars. Perhaps most notably, its fiber body is made from a novel linen-based biocomposite designed so the material can later be extracted and recycled.
“One thing that’s very clear for David and me is that recycling isn’t just a lab concept. You can recycle almost anything in a lab. What makes something recyclable has to do with how it’s built,” Espinosa said. “When you build something, you have to try to preserve the integrity of the material and the components so that a second life is possible.”
“Real circularity” is where Espinosa comes from; he previously cofounded Auara, a Spanish B Corp selling natural mineral water in bottles that are both recycled and recyclable. But after a larger player acquired this successful brand, he embarked on a new chapter with Sancho as his co-driver.
When it comes to cars, Sancho is in the driver’s seat, with low emissions on the radar. His specialty is engineering electric vehicles that can rival gas-powered ones. Before Liux, his most impressive feat was the Bóreas, a hybrid supercar unveiled at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2017. But after a fallout with his former partners, he and Espinosa teamed up to found Liux.
Liux’s first prototype, the Animal, combined their expertise: The fully electric five-seater was made almost entirely from recycled or plant-based materials. And yet, the two co-founders decided to pivot soon after unveiling the SUV to the world in 2022. It was then that they determined that their odds of completing homologation would be much higher with a smaller car.
Fast forward to 2026, and Liux has secured Europe-wide homologation for the Liux Big, which it expects to start selling in the first half of next year. In the meantime, the company has grown to 65 employees and is getting ready to ramp up production across three facilities in Spain.
These include the plant that TechCrunch visited in Azuqueca de Henares, about a one-hour drive from central Madrid.
Liux’s Azuqueca factory is small because it follows Toyota’s “lean management” principles and performs only the last steps of the process, said its head of production Beatriz Belda González, a Spanish-born engineer who previously worked for BMW in Munich. But don’t let its size fool you: Liux says its production capacity could reach 20,000 cars a year by 2030.
Image Credits: Liux /
It is still too early to gauge demand, but more than 7,500 people have joined the waiting list for a Liux Big. Joining doesn’t require a fee, but the list has helped the startup learn more about its prospective buyers. The most represented profile is a 55- to 60-year-old city dweller, and Liux is now assuming that the Liux Big will often be a household’s second car.
This may dampen hopes that microcars could challenge traditional car ownership, but Liux has to pick its battles, Espinosa said. Rather than trying to guess where the market is going, or how fast, the startup is keeping the door open to partnerships with companies that manage B2B fleets and others that could help make its cars autonomous.
For Espinosa, the Liux Big could already make a difference by offering a more sustainable option that is also affordable. The startup hasn’t confirmed its final price tag, but said it will be below €18,000 — about $21,000 — before potential EV subsidies. This puts it at the higher end of the price range for microcars, but Liux hopes it will punch above its weight — literally.
According to Liux’s head of R&D, Celso Fernández Llorens, weight and size limitations are a huge constraint in this category. In his view, most microcars are fairly similar, despite the fact that European authorities differentiate ultralight L6e four-wheelers from slightly heavier L7e ones. Liux, however worked around these constraints to make the most of its L7e homologation.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Thanks to a litany of decisions large and small, the startup managed to fit a 260-liter trunk into the car. But most of its efforts were geared toward making sure users feel like they are driving a car, rather than a two-wheeler. That’s also closely tied to safety, Sancho said: you don’t want a car that’s only lightweight because its frame can’t withstand a crash, or that will topple on the first turn.
With this in mind, and despite the fact that its category doesn’t even require crash tests, Liux has been testing and showcasing the Liux Big’s ability to slalom, brake, and perform other maneuvers. The startup demonstrated some of those capabilities to TechCrunch during a short ride and test drive in its upcoming off-road version.
For now, its main model will have two versions: 15 kWh and 20 kWh. A cargo version is also planned, and with Sancho on the team, the temptation to build a supercar is never far away. In a LinkedIn post, the company noted that it doesn’t intend to be “a one-car brand.”
First, though, Liux will use the €16 million it has secured so far (about $18.5 million, including European funding) to bring the Liux Big’s urban version to market through partnerships with car dealerships across Europe.
The showroom where we met is also a preview of Liux’s future sales experience, head of brand Ana Terrado Leyva said. She pointed to textile screens, 3D models showcasing the Liux Big’s three color options — two more than the Ford T — and a linoleum floor as a nod to linen. These aesthetic choices, she said, are another way Liux hopes to stand out from its Chinese competitors.
Maybe the idea of a European car does exist.
Topics
electric mobility, Europe, Spain, Startups, sustainability, Transportation
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TechCrunch Mobility: The hidden human cost of robotaxis
9:03 AM PDT · August 30, 2026
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, the role AI is playing in it. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!
Proponents of autonomous vehicle technology have long argued that robotaxis and other self-driving vehicles will reduce crash incidents and make roads safer. And there is some evidence of that. But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a cost to those who are working (or have worked) for the companies developing that tech.
Sean O’Kane, senior reporter, special projects, dug into data submitted to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and found that test drivers for Waymo and Zoox sustained more than two dozen injuries in 2024 and 2025 from hard braking or other sudden movements made by the autonomous vehicles. In some cases, these workers were sidelined for months after sustaining injuries like whiplash when the AVs stopped abruptly, and hard.
Check out his full story, which includes interviews with former and current workers.
There is one important item to consider. You might ask yourself, well what about the other AV developers? Surely, this isn’t a problem isolated to Waymo and Zoox? And you’re probably right. It’s likely that test drivers for other AV developers are also getting injured, but the companies they work for may be exempt from OSHA’s reporting requirements.
Got a tip for us on this story or others? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or my Signal at kkorosec.07, Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com.
Deals!
I’ve been writing about Gatik, the autonomous vehicle startup known for its self-driving box trucks, since 2019 when it came out of “stealth.” At the time, I wasn’t sure if the startup would survive. The hype cycle was already chewing up and spitting out AV startups and no one seemed close to commercializing their tech.
Gatik has not only survived, but it has also crossed over from R&D lab to commercial operator, albeit at a small-scale compared with traditional human-driven delivery companies. (The company’s box trucks are driverless and deliver freight from distribution centers to retails stores like Walmart.) And now, with $200 million in fresh funding, it’s pushing to scale. The round was led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies, with participation from Millennium Management, ARK Invest, and Intact Private Capital.
This is Gatik’s largest funding to date. But I might argue that its multiyear commercial agreement with PepsiCo, which was signed in June and is part of $600 million in contracted revenue, is the bigger deal here.
Other deals that got my attention …
Airbound, an Indian startup building autonomous drones, raised $37 million in a Series A round led by Greenoaks with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures.
Mubadala Capital, the alternative asset management arm of Mubadala Investment Company, agreed to acquire a majority equity interest in Arrive Logistics, a truckload brokerage based in Austin.
Regent Craft, a Rhode Island electric startup developing and manufacturing electric seagliders, raised $120 million in a Series B round co-led by Mare Liberum and AE Ventures. (The seaglider is a class of vehicle called a wing-in-ground effect vehicle, or WIG.) Regent also secured about $120 million debt capital provided by Erebor Bank, which was launched by Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey. One note about Regent, a company I have followed for a while: The startup, which recently completed its 255,000-square-foot seaglider factory, is clearly pushing deeper into the defense sector, probably because there is money and partnerships to be had.
Vista Global Holding, a private aviation group based in UAE, is considering a European IPO that could raise more than a $1 billion, Bloomberg reported.
Notable reads and other tidbits
According to a recent YouGov survey, more Americans oppose police license plate cameras than support them. Do you? Shoot me an email and share your opinion.
Any, an electric two-wheeler startup out of Belgium, is placing a bet on cargo space.
General Motors is facing increased scrutiny from U.S. safety regulators after hundreds of incidents, more than 20 crashes or fires, and at least six injuries involving brake problems in its EVs.
Ford has hired Dave Carroll as president of the company’s energy business. Carroll, who previously worked at ENGIE North America, will succeed long-time executive Lisa Drake.
Rivian CFO Claire McDonough is resigning from her position and will leave at the end of October. Her tenure at Rivian came during a tough, and exciting (ahem IPO), period for the company. And her departure comes at another critical moment for Rivian as it takes on some of its biggest projects to date, including the robotaxi deal with Uber and scaling production and sales of its R2 SUV.
Uber is launching a new live video streaming feature that will allow parents to keep track of their children during rides.
Waymo shared 10 lessons it has learned after its vehicles had driven more than 200 million autonomous miles. The first lesson — that multimodal sensors are indispensable — received the most attention because it is in direct opposition to Tesla’s camera-only approach. But there were other lessons that got my attention, including Waymo’s promotion of vision language models (an area that is starting to get a lot of attention).
Meanwhile, Waymo is making more inroads overseas. The company announced that it plans to launch in Munich, Germany.
One more thing …
One important clarification on what I wrote about last week. You might recall that Waymo shared information about its custom silicon chip — specifically a 5 nm ASIC chip that is designed to handle the massive influx of raw data before it reaches the core “brain” of the self-driving system. Waymo stated in its blog post:
“While these ASICs alone deliver over 1,000 TOPS of ML performance dedicated to front-end processing and ML models, we optimize across the full stack to maximize achieved performance, especially in the low-batch regimes we often operate.”
That line led me, and others, to believe that its one chip can deliver 1,000 TOPs (trillions of operations per second) of computing performance. I compared it to Nvidia’s Drive AGX Thor automotive processor, noting it was about the same performance.
But alas, one eagle-eyed reader reached out with some questions, which prompted me to turn to Waymo for official answers. A Waymo spokesperson told me, “It’s for the system, not a single chip.”
That’s an important distinction.
Topics
robotaxis, techcrunch mobility, Transportation, Waymo
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