Inc.
The $25,000 Amble One asks a radical question: how much car do short trips really need?
An Ex‑Apple Designer Built an EV With No Doors and a Top Speed of 40 MPH. It Might Just Be the Future
Author: Connor Jewiss
On June 25, in Lisbon, Portugal a startup called Amble unveiled its first vehicle, and the most noticeable thing about it was everything it left out. The Amble One has no doors, almost no screens, a cork-wrapped steering wheel, a canvas roof, a top speed of 40 miles per hour, and a curb weight of 992 pounds—roughly a fifth of a Tesla Model Y. The restraint reads differently once you know who drew it. Design lead Julian Hoenig spent his Apple years on the Apple Watch, the Vision Pro, and the company’s abandoned car program. Before that, he shaped the Audi R8.
The rest of the EV industry has spent a decade heading the other way: bigger batteries, longer ranges, faster charging, more software, and more weight. Most automakers are treating the electric transition as a chance to rebuild the car exactly as we know it, just with a battery underneath. Amble’s founding premise is that millions of daily trips never justified a car in the first place.
That premise has data behind it: A study for the Bureau of Transportation Statistics found that 52 percent of all American trips in 2021 covered less than three miles, and 28 percent spanned less than one. Think of a hotel guest moving from villa to beach, the school run inside a gated community, and the grocery trip in a warm coastal town. A full-size SUV can do all of these, but it is too heavy, too sealed off, and too much machine for the job. The car became the default answer to every mobility question, and Amble is treating that as a design failure.
The product is further along than a concept sketch, though with first deliveries a year out, there’s plenty of time for the schedule to move and for a young company to stumble. The Amble One starts at roughly $25,000 before taxes and fees, with a 15 kW motor, more than 60 miles of range, and a five-and-a-half-hour charge from a domestic socket. Its 992-pound weight means the vehicle qualifies as an L7e quadricycle in Europe, a class below the car, which spares Amble the crash-testing regime that has bankrupted better-funded EV startups.
The materials are aluminum, leather, cotton, and cork, which were chosen to allow the vehicle’s components to age rather than wear out. Alongside Hoenig, the founders are Adrien Roose, who co-founded the e-bike maker Cowboy; Michael Tropper of London design studio Forpeople; and José António Uva, the hotelier who spent 14 years turning Portugal’s São Lourenço do Barrocal into one of Europe’s most admired rural retreats.
Where the first 1,000 will go
Amble is not opening with consumers. Its first deliveries in mid-2027 will go to hospitality properties, among them Amangiri in Utah; the island of Mustique; Six Senses Les Bordes in the Loire Valley; and Uva’s own Na Praia development in Comporta, Portugal. Wired reports 12 signed clients, more than 500 vehicles committed, and over 10 million euros in signed revenue before a single delivery.
Resorts already buy golf carts (which typically cost between $11,000 and $14,000) and utility vehicles, so the use case requires no persuasion, only an upgrade. These buyers are far less price-sensitive than a household—$25,000 reads differently as a line item at a property that obsesses over guest touchpoints than it does in a family budget. And every guest who rides one becomes a test driver, a photograph, and a lead for the consumer launch planned for 2028.
Its market sat unclaimed because the vehicle falls between two industries. Golf cart incumbents such as Club Car and E-Z-Go sell utility equipment through fleet procurement, where the winning bid is the cheapest one. Automakers, meanwhile, have spent the EV transition chasing the biggest market they can certify a car for, and a low-volume vehicle that sits below the car is too small a prize to justify the tooling.
The one automaker that did take a radical design swing shows why the others won’t. Elon Musk projected the Cybertruck would sell 250,000 units a year, but Cox Automotive estimates that roughly 39,000 sold in 2024 and 20,237 in 2025, with billions in tooling behind the miss. That arithmetic has pushed the interesting design risks down to vehicles small enough that a wrong bet won’t sink the company.
It took a hotelier, an e-bike founder, and two industrial designers to look at the same buggy from the outside and see a product rather than equipment. The Apple connection is easy to see, as Amble points a familiar Cupertino question at a neglected category: What would this product feel like if the experience mattered as much as the function? Golf carts have always been bought like equipment. Amble wants its sales based on design, which moves its competitive set away from Club Car and toward the feeling of staying at an Aman or riding a Cowboy (the popular Belgian e-bike).
The market underneath it
Amble is also coming into a market that was growing before anyone tried to make it desirable. Fortune Business Insights values the global low-speed vehicle market at $14.32 billion in 2025 and projects it to reach $29.73 billion by 2034, with North America accounting for roughly 45 percent of demand. Grand View Research puts the adjacent micro electric vehicle market at $9.84 billion in 2024, heading toward $20.26 billion by 2030, with quadricycles—the class the Amble One occupies—generating 60 percent of that revenue. The numbers guarantee Amble nothing, but they show the segment has outgrown its reputation as a curiosity.
Car pricing is doing some of Amble’s marketing for it. The average new vehicle in America now sells for close to $50,000, and Cox Automotive counts just four models still starting under $25,000, down from 36 in 2017. Meanwhile, the number of vehicles priced at $60,000 or more has nearly doubled, to 114. As the car drifts upmarket, the gap beneath it widens.
The clearest validation arrived this week, and it came from a manufacturer with no interest in cork steering wheels. Stellantis opened U.S. orders for the Fiat Topolino, a two-seat electric quadricycle with 46 miles of range aimed at private communities, resorts, and golf-cart towns, at $13,995. When a legacy automaker starts shipping a vehicle deliberately smaller, slower, and cheaper than a car, the space below the car has become a market to watch.
The most awkward obstacle in Amble’s U.S. plan is regulatory. Europe’s L7e quadricycle class was effectively written for vehicles like this one, giving the Amble One a legal home on public roads at its full 40 mph. The United States has no equivalent: Its federally defined low-speed vehicle category caps out at 25 mph, which leaves the Amble One stranded between classifications—too fast to qualify as an LSV and not built to the crash standards of a full car. It’s not yet clear how Amble intends to resolve this issue while keeping its top speed. Fiat sidestepped the same problem by shipping the Topolino at 19 mph with a conversion kit to follow. Amble has not yet published its answer, and the American consumer rollout depends on one.
There are other reasons for caution. Every commercial figure so far comes from Amble itself, and no independent outlet has driven the vehicle. The price invites scrutiny of its own, because at nearly twice the cost of a Topolino, the Amble One makes sense in only a narrow set of environments, all of them warm, affluent, and controlled. An open cabin is charming in Comporta but considerably less persuasive in a Chicago January. Amble’s actual bet is narrower than replacing the car: It hopes that enough households want a better second vehicle for the trips where a car feels absurd, and that hospitality revenue will fund the wait while regulators catch up.
For a century, the car absorbed every job we gave it: commute, school run, grocery trip, beach shuttle, status symbol, and family room on wheels. The electric transition offers a chance to rethink that bundle, but most automakers copied it instead. Amble is wagering that the unbundling has now started and that the vehicles that pull the first jobs away from the car will look a lot like this one: small, slow, open to the weather, and designed for exactly the trips the car was never good at.
Credits: TCA, LLC.