What Are LUVs?
Picture something bigger than a bike, smaller than a car, and a lot more useful for the trip you’re actually taking. That’s a LUV — a Local Use Vehicle:
Electrified, with 2 to 4 wheels — pedal-assisted or fully motorized.
More power than an e-bike (over 750 watts, less than a motorcycle).
Built to move people, deliveries, or bulk cargo.
Why There’s a Gap
Federal rules only define the edges of this category: bikes and e-bikes at the bottom, and one category near the top: the Low-Speed Vehicle (LSV), capped at 3,000 lbs, 25 mph, with basic safety gear but not full crash-tested design.
Everything in between? No rules built for it.
And the edges don’t hold up, either. Go slightly faster or heavier than an LSV, and federal rules jump straight to full car & truck crashworthiness requirements — the same ones built for a highway-speed SUV, not a low-speed neighborhood vehicle. That single line rules out vehicle types already operating safely at scale elsewhere: compact quadricycles across Europe, e-tuk tuks in Asia. Stay under the line instead, and a vehicle can still get waved through as a “car” it was never built to be.
And that’s before every state layers its own rules on top.
We’ve built a coalition that’s leading the way forward. Learn more about the opportunity.
LUVs look and work many different ways. They can have a seat or a saddle, they can have pedals or a throttle, no doors or six. They can move people, goods, or tools. They can take you to the store and they can supply that store. Here are some examples:
