LIUX BIG: the linen car changing the European automotive industry
A Spanish startup’s flax-fibre electric microcar is challenging the assumptions of what a sustainable vehicle can be, creating new possibilities for mobility design.
There is a common assumption in the automotive industry that sustainability is essentially an energy problem. Swap the combustion engine for a battery pack, electrify the powertrain, and the car’s environmental credentials more or less take care for themselves. LIUX, a Spanish startup founded in 2021, thinks this is wrong.
Their first production vehicle, the BIG, makes the argument in physical form: with a body largely built from bio-based linen materials, a kerb weight under 600 kg, and a carbon footprint that the company claims to be 40% lower than a conventional EV. Launching in Europe priced below €18,000, it is a small, two-seat compact city car, and one of the most radical propositions in sustainable automotive design in years.
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The founders’ core insight is that weight is the real enemy. The automotive industry’s response to electrification has been largely to add mass: bigger batteries, heavier platforms, more reinforcements. However, for LIUX co-founder David Sancho Domingo, the solution was to take the opposite path, concentrating the mass only where the physics demanded. In BIG, the weight is concentrated in the crash structures, the battery, and the drivetrain, all positioned low, and the result is an upper body structure that weighs just 45 kg.
This structure is made from flax fibre composite. Flax is the same plant from which we make linen textile, and it turns out to have great properties as a structural material in a similar way to carbon fibre. It is a crop which naturally sequesters CO2 during growth, while carbon fibre, by contrast, requires energy-intensive manufacturing and is currently non-recyclable. The company has partnered with Taiwanese materials company Swancor to use their EzCiclo thermoset resin, a bio-based binder with a patented recycling process, to develop their flax fibre composite structure.
Using a solvolysis process, automotive parts made from this material can be fully decomposed, separating the resin and fibre cleanly, generating no waste liquid or exhaust. The recycled linen fibre can be remade into yarn, and the recovered resin can re-enter production after adjustment. This is a major improvement over landfill or incineration, it is a closed loop, at least in principle, for the material that forms most of the car’s exterior.
The company was founded specifically around the idea of creating more sustainable solutions within automotive, and BIG is, in a sense, the demonstration of a thesis of how cars should be designed. The bio-based material represents a 61% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to an equivalent steel body, and a 40% reduction in weight. The seats and plastics components use recycled materials, the battery architecture is modular and removable, as in it is not only swappable, but upgradeable as battery technologies improve. This is a feature that extends the vehicle’s useful life rather than designing it for obsolescence.
There are, of course, caveats to this sustainable dream. The BIG is an L7e vehicle, meaning it is electronically limited to 90 km/h, categorised as a heavy quadricycle, not a full passenger car. Its safety standards are also regulated differently, especially for the linen composite, as L7e crash requirements are much less stringent than regular car standards.
Whether LIUX can execute at scale remains to be seen, also as the European market is under pressure from the low-cost Chinese competition. Still, the BIG is a cleverly useful provocation, demonstrating the many different ways in which cars can actually be made more sustainably, and how the major automotive companies are ignoring these possibilities.
