The world's smallest luxury electric car, built for big, congested cities. It threads through traffic, skips the parking hunt, and takes the headache out of rush hour.
Built small, beautiful, and luxurious.
Cities are getting more congested, and the race to solve urban mobility is on. Bikes, motorcycles, even helicopters dodge traffic, but each comes with its own compromises. The LUV takes a different route: the world's smallest luxury electric vehicle. At 86cm wide and 340cm long it slips into parking spots nothing else fits, while still carrying two people in real comfort.
The LUV was in its advanced prototype phase. The team needed to design the dashboard and control panels inside the car, and they were up against two hard limits: very little space, and a shortage of components small enough to run everything the car promised.
Structure every feature the car offered into something a driver could navigate without looking away from the road.
Brainstorm, research, and test the wheel as a primary way to move through the interface.
Brainstorm and test the door panels as a second set of physical controls.
Translate the structure into the on-screen interface, matching the LUV brand.
Detailed design handoff so the dev team could build it into a real car.
Make everything reachable. With no touchscreen.
The core challenge: make the interface intuitive and let people reach every feature easily, without a touchscreen. This isn't only about comfort. A driver fighting the software instead of watching the road is a safety problem. And it was a lot to organise, multiple complex features with nested menus, all through physical controls.
What you see here is a small slice of the hundreds of UI states we designed for the dashboard. The car was tiny, but the R&D team and investors didn't want to compromise on luxury, so the screen had to carry a full, premium feature set with nothing feeling stripped back.
The layout centered on a speed clock that always stayed in the middle, with two customizable screens, one on each side. Navigation, Music, Calls, Leaning Angle, Energy Consumption, and more all had to stay one glance away and instantly scannable, even on a display that small.
The engineers handed us a list of physical features. Our job was to design how the driver would control each one, with no room for extra buttons, switches, or a touchscreen. Every choice had to earn its place within very tight constraints.
So we built a working prototype that mimicked how the final dashboard would behave, then tested it with real users.
The dev team designed and 3D-printed a prototype wheel scaled to the car. We tested it, and it failed: too thick, uncomfortable to hold, and the controls were hard to reach. It restricted how the driver could move.
Don't reinvent the wheel.
The lesson was clear: a custom wheel was fighting us for no real gain. So we didn't reinvent it. We took a proven steering wheel already on the market and added the few controls the LUV actually needed.
Every control the driver needs is within a thumb or finger of the wheel, mapped so nothing competes with steering.
Central screen with speedometer, important information, and notifications
After weeks of workshops, meetings, and design sessions, we landed the final control layout, spread across the whole cabin so nothing needs a touchscreen.
The doors carry the controls that didn't belong on the wheel or the central screen, split so the driver reaches comfort and the passenger reaches the lock.
The LUV reached showcar production. The steering wheel was manufactured and the UI was implemented in the physical car.
The car didn't enter mass production, but the design was fully built and running in the vehicle, along with the physical controls and steering wheel.
This project was built under real constraints: tiny space, missing parts, no touchscreen. It taught me and the team a lot about designing for focus and safety. Designing the user experience for a car leaves no room for error, since a wrong call can put a passenger's life at risk. And even though the process was detailed, it stayed fast and lean.