LUV1: The Electric 'Life Utility Vehicle' From Ex-Pininfarina and Ferrari Designers Taking Aim at Urban Car Trips

A new Italian startup with serious automotive pedigree has pulled the covers off a vehicle that defies easy categorisation. ANY Mobility, founded by designers and engineers who have worked at Pininfarina, Ferrari, Aprilia, and Vespa, chose Milan Design Week to launch the LUV1 -- a machine the company describes as a Life Utility Vehicle, or LUV, Ride Apart has recently reported.

It is not quite a scooter, not quite a cargo bike, not quite a commuter motorcycle, and not quite a microcar. It is, deliberately, something in between all of them.

The thinking behind the LUV1 is straightforward: most short urban journeys -- the school run, a supermarket trip, ferrying equipment across town -- still default to the car, largely because nothing else feels practical enough. 

ANY Mobility wants to change that. Rather than chasing headline acceleration figures or aggressive styling, the LUV1 has been built around the kind of everyday usefulness that makes it genuinely easy to live with. It is compact enough to thread through city traffic and slot into gaps that would stump a conventional car, yet it carries 120 litres of integrated storage, configurable cargo dividers, front and rear racks, swappable body panels, and optional weather protection.

The design work was handled by Granstudio, the Turin studio led by Lowie Vermeersch, the former design director of Pininfarina. That background shows. Where many utility-focused electric vehicles lean on fake vents and overwrought bodywork to justify their price tags, the LUV1 takes the opposite approach -- clean surfaces, modular panels, and proportions that sit closer to considered design object than workaday delivery scooter. It has a character that most machines in this space simply do not bother with.

Notably, ANY Mobility is not pitching this at motorcycle enthusiasts. The LUV1 is aimed squarely at city dwellers who have grown weary of manoeuvring full-sized cars around congested streets for errands that rarely justify it.