Europe's cities have been shrinking their cars for years, but the tiny EVs filling those parking spots increasingly come from Chinese factories, not European ones. A Spanish startup called Liux thinks it found the crack in that trend, and it's betting an entire company on it.
The car is called the Liux Big, which is a joke. It's small enough to park nose-in at a right angle to the curb, the kind of vehicle that makes parallel parking obsolete. But according to TechCrunch's reporting, the name also nods to the size of the ambition behind it: a startup trying to out-sustainability the flood of small Chinese EVs that have taken over a market once ruled by Italy's beloved "yoghurt pot" microcars. Even Smart, the brand that basically invented the ultracompact city car, now builds in China.
Liux is following a path blazed by Switzerland's Microlino, carving out space with something smaller and, the founders hope, more thoughtfully built.
Here's the part that catches you off guard. Liux opened Spain's first new car plant in more than 30 years and leans hard into its "made in Spain" identity. So when co-founder Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros told TechCrunch, "The idea of a European car does not exist," it lands as a genuinely surprising admission from the CEO of a company selling Spanish-made cars. It's also, he and co-founder David Sancho concluded, just the truth: a fully sovereign supply chain isn't realistic in 2026. So instead of chasing an all-European bill of materials, Liux is chasing something narrower and arguably more useful: sustainability as the actual design constraint, not a marketing bullet point.
The Liux Big's body is made from a novel linen-based biocomposite, engineered specifically so the material can be pulled back out and recycled later rather than shredded into landfill filler. Espinosa put it plainly: "You can recycle almost anything in a lab. What makes something recyclable has to do with how it's built. 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."
That philosophy traces back to his last company, Auara, a Spanish B Corp that sold natural mineral water in bottles made from recycled and recyclable materials, before a larger player acquired it. Circularity isn't a pivot for Espinosa, it's his whole résumé.
On batteries, the reporting gets a little muddled between sources. TechCrunch's original piece describes the Liux Big's batteries, which aren't manufactured in Europe, as designed to be easily replaceable. A separate writeup of the same interview instead describes them as rechargeable at home, including via solar power. Those aren't mutually exclusive claims, but it's worth flagging that the sourcing doesn't cleanly agree on which feature Liux is actually emphasizing. Either way, the stated goal is the same: a car built to dodge the fast obsolescence cycle that swallows most modern EVs.
Sancho brings the engineering pedigree. Before Liux, his marquee project was the Bóreas, a hybrid supercar unveiled at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2017, built around the idea that electric vehicles could genuinely rival gas-powered performance. After a falling out with his former partners there, he teamed up with Espinosa to start fresh.
Their first swing was the Animal, a fully electric five-seater unveiled in 2022 and built almost entirely from recycled or plant-based materials. Ambitious, and apparently too ambitious. The pair pivoted after concluding a smaller car had far better odds of clearing Europe's homologation process. That bet paid off: Liux has now secured Europe-wide homologation for the Big and expects to start selling it in the first half of next year.
Liux has grown to 65 employees and is prepping production across three Spanish facilities, including a plant in Azuqueca de Henares, about an hour from Madrid. The factory is deliberately small, following Toyota-style lean manufacturing and handling only the final assembly steps, according to head of production Beatriz Belda, an engineer who previously worked for BMW in Munich. Small footprint now, big claims about scale later: Liux says it could hit production capacity of 20,000 cars a year by 2030.
Demand is still theoretical. More than 7,500 people have joined a no-fee waitlist, which tells you there's curiosity but nothing close to confirmed sales.
A linen-bodied microcar from a Spanish startup with 65 employees isn't going to dethrone China's EV manufacturing scale, and Liux isn't pretending otherwise. What it's actually betting on is a narrower thesis: that a car designed to be repaired, recycled, and kept alive longer can be a real point of differentiation, not just a sustainability footnote. Homologation is done and the factory is built. The only question left is whether 7,500 waitlist sign-ups turn into actual buyers once a price tag shows up.
For more on Europe's shifting microcar landscape and the startups chasing Chinese EV makers, check out our ongoing EV coverage.