The Liux Big microcar is Spain’s most audacious bet that a small European car built around genuine sustainability can hold its own against a flood of cheap Chinese EVs. That is a tall order for a 65-person startup based in Azuqueca de Henares, but Liux has spent four years quietly building the case.
The company secured Europe-wide homologation for the Big in 2026 and expects to start selling it in the first half of next year. Pricing will come in below €18,000 (around $21,000) before any EV subsidies, sitting at the higher end of the microcar bracket. The waiting list already has more than 7,500 names on it, and joining costs nothing.
What the Liux Big Microcar Actually Offers
The name is, deliberately, a joke. The car is small enough to park perpendicular to the kerb, and its L7e homologation puts it in the slightly heavier of the two European ultralight categories. But co-founder and chief engineer David Sancho, whose previous headline act was the Bóreas hybrid supercar unveiled at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2017, used that L7e classification to squeeze in a 260-litre boot, two battery options (15 kWh and 20 kWh), and a driving feel the company insists is closer to a conventional car than to a glorified moped.
Safety has been treated as a choice rather than a legal obligation. Liux’s category does not require crash tests, but the company has been putting the Big through slalom runs, hard braking, and high-speed manoeuvres anyway, and demonstrated some of them to journalists during a recent test drive.
The body is where Liux most pointedly departs from its rivals. The panels are made from a linen-based biocomposite, chosen specifically so the material can be extracted and recycled at end of life. Co-founder Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros, who previously built Auara, a Spanish social enterprise bottling mineral water in 100% recycled and recyclable packaging, is clear that the distinction matters.
‘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,’ Espinosa said. ‘You can recycle almost anything in a lab. What makes something recyclable has to do with how it’s built.’
The batteries are not European-made, and Liux does not pretend otherwise. A fully sovereign supply chain, Espinosa and Sancho concluded, is unattainable. What the company can control is how the car is maintained and powered: the Big charges at home, including via solar panels, and is designed to sidestep the rapid obsolescence cycles that shorten the life of most modern EVs.
The Funding Picture and Who Is Actually Buying
Liux has raised a total of €16 million (around $18.5 million), including European funding, according to the company. A breakdown circulated by EU-Startups puts the European Innovation Council’s contribution at €14.5 million, comprising a €2.5 million grant, €6 million in EIC Fund equity, and €6 million in additional funding. The two figures may refer to different moments or tranches in the fundraising timeline.
That capital is being used to bring the urban version of the Big to market through dealerships across Europe, while three production facilities in Spain ramp up. The Azuqueca plant follows Toyota’s lean-management principles and handles only the final assembly steps, according to head of production Beatriz Belda González, who previously worked for BMW in Munich. Liux says capacity could reach 20,000 cars a year by 2030.
The waiting-list data has already reshaped Liux’s assumptions about its customer. The most represented profile is a 55- to 60-year-old city dweller, and the company now expects the Big will typically be a household’s second car. That punctures the more romantic notion that microcars could disrupt car ownership wholesale, but Espinosa frames it pragmatically: the startup has to pick its battles.
Espinosa is not short of credentials to carry that argument. Sustainable Brands Madrid notes he featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of Spain’s most influential young entrepreneurs, and his LinkedIn profile lists architecture studies at Universidad San Pablo-CEU and the Politecnico di Milano, which perhaps explains the attention to materials and form that runs through everything Liux makes.
The showroom in Azuqueca, with its textile screens, 3D models of the three colour options, and linoleum floor laid as a nod to linen, is framed by head of brand Ana Terrado Leyva as a deliberate counterpoint to what Chinese competitors offer. Whether aesthetics and circularity can move metal at scale is the question Liux will have to answer once the Liux Big microcar hits showrooms. The company has already said it does not intend to be a one-car brand, and Sancho’s supercar instincts have not gone anywhere. First, though, the linen-bodied city car has to prove the market exists.
