One of the major variable costs in producing a new vehicle is shipping them from the factory to the dealership or end user. The main part of a car, where the passengers go, is full of air during shipment, so they take up significantly more space than they would broken down into component pieces. Stellantis is working with Swedish startup Luvly to produce an Ikea-style flat pack quadricycle which ships around the world for a fraction of what it would cost to ship a completely assembled car. Luvly’s proof of concept, the O electric quadricycle shown here, indicates that the company could ship 250 flat-packed units in the same size container it would take to ship twenty fully-assembled models.
End-user delivery makes up somewhere around ten percent of a car’s retail price, and by nearly eliminating that cost variable, Luvly says it can pass the savings on to consumers with a lower-priced product that comes with less per-unit cost in shipping emissions to boot. Fitting 250 cars in a single shipping container could absolutely revolutionize the automobile industry. Of course the Luvly O is a very small two-seat electric vehicle, so you couldn’t fit 250 Ram 1500s in a single container no matter how many pieces you took off, but it’s a start, and the tech behind it is simple and easy to implement across any number of new vehicles. It doesn’t really matter that the Luvly O is limited to just 6.5 kWh of battery (about half what’s in my Harley-Davidson Livewire, for example) or that its top speed is just 56 miles per hour, or even its low theoretical price tag. What matters to Luvly, and to Stellantis, is the construction.
Simply Luvly
The Luvly O is built around a series of aluminum extrusions with composite panels to bridge the gap and make a body. The company had been working on a small monocoque design, but quickly found that while the design was strong it was also ridiculously expensive to produce and ship.
“Doing that means the panels are super-cheap and we can ship them in pieces,” Luvly head Håkan Lutz told Autocar. “It also means we can tailor the panels for different vehicles.” The glues that connect the parts set in around three minutes, and Lutz estimates that production by robots could be done in around a minute.
Stellantis already sells a series of massively successful quadricycles of its own, the platform-shared siblings Citroën Ami, Fiat Topolino and Opel Rocks-e. It’s possible that the next-generation of Stellantis small Euro EV could make use of Luvly’s modular flat-pack architecture. Perhaps this would bring the price down even below the already affordable 7,695 Euro Ami.
“The aim of this partnership is to show that we can deliver on our promises,” Lutz told Zag Daily. “This is the first major commercial partnership with a player as pivotal as Stellantis,” he added. “If we manage to prove the level of safety and the economics of our platform and Stellantis chooses to adopt it, that is a major thing—not only for us, but for the industry.”
