As the push to decarbonise transport intensifies, a new class of compact, low-emission vehicles is rising to meet the challenge. From Nissan’s NanoCar to the UK-based Yo-Go, micro-mobility is redefining what sustainable urban travel can look like, without demanding a wholesale change in consumer behaviour.

The pressure is on to find alternatives to internal combustion engine-driven vehicles. EVs present the obvious solution, and in many ways, the most appealing for customers who want a solution to the threat of climate change that doesn’t mean changing their lifestyle. Public transport offers a more effective solution, but would require a huge amount of investment to make it an appealing alternative to car ownership.

Micro-mobility is an option that can split the difference.

“In its simplest form, Micro-mobility is light weight, low speed vehicles,” explains Gareth Dunsmore, Managing Director of e-Micro Mobility Nissan AMIEO. “That makes it an ideal form of transportation to reduce emissions and traffic in dense environments such as cities and towns.”

It is a category that includes electric scooters and bikes, as well as “micro cars”; buggy-like vehicles that are visually similar to golf carts but are a great deal more powerful.

Dunsmore is overseeing a collaboration between Nissan and Spanish renewable energy conglomerate ACCIONA to distribute the new Silence S04 NanoCar, a lightweight, 100% electric four-wheeled vehicle specifically designed for urban living.

Nissan holds distribution rights for the NanoCar in France and Italy, alongside Silence’s electric motorcycles. It gives ACCIONA’s electric vehicle brand, Silence, access to Nissan’s European network of dealerships across Europe. The goal is to lower the barrier for consumers who want to go electric, making the transition more inclusive and accessible.

“Nissan has done this rather than build its own vehicle because it gives us the best of both worlds,” Dunsmore tells us. “We get to use all our expertise in electric vehicles from the last 15 years to accelerate the adoption of these vehicles and bring more people in. But at the same time, we can work with a young, agile start-up whose focus and passion are directed just at this segment, so we can benefit from what they have learned from the last decade in the electric bike sector.”

Meanwhile back in the UK, the CEO and inventor of the Yo-Go, Sam Bailey, likes to differentiate micro-mobility from what he calls “Mini-mobility”.

“It’s to differentiate it from bikes and scooters,” Bailey says. “It’s a market that is yet to be addressed. We don’t consider ourselves as an alternative to the e-scooter. We are offering a new form of transport.”

An existing international market

It is a nascent sector, but a promising one, and while it is new to the UK market, other locations are already showing the way that market might evolve.

“There’s an island in Hong Kong called Discovery Bay that is exclusively for golf buggies,” says Bailey. “It started out as a solution to moving around a golf course, and it’s evolved to actually become a usable mode of transport. It’s not a vehicle you’d use on a golf course. It’s faster, sturdier, road legal, and while it ostensibly looks like a golf buggy, it now represents a step up in engineering and mechanics.”

 In Europe the market has already been around for quite some time, with a presence in France, Italy, Greece, Spain and around the Mediterranean coast.

“The sector developed originally from French and Italian brands, using ICE vehicles. They have been in it for a long time, but they were only focused on selling to their own domestic markets,” Dunsmore tells us. “We have seen around 60,000 vehicles sold in the last 12 months from all the competitors in the top three markets, but one of the interesting things is how poorly this sector is documented.”

The issue is that the lower power version of the micro-car does not require registration, making it harder to keep track of numbers. That said, Dunsmore says there are studies that expect distribution to approach 300,000 units by 2028.

He puts this down to three factors. First, more competitors are entering the market, including mainstream OEMs such as Toyota and Nissan.

“It brings a level of scale through our retailer networks that wasn’t here in the past,” Dunsmore tells us.

At the same time, a broader group of customers are starting to look for new forms of mobility.

“The entry price for a Ford has gone from below £10,000 to above £20,000 in a decade,” says Dunsmore. “That is not just inflation. That’s leaving customers behind.”

Finally, there is a wave of new, younger customers entering the market who take electrification and the need for zero emissions seriously, but who simply cannot afford to pay £20,000 for a new electric vehicle.

”Their decisions are informed by societal challenges we face such as air pollution and climate change, but they cannot afford and do not have the means to ignore affordability,” Dunsmore tells us.

New offerings

Currently the UK market is a small one, under 5600 vehicles a year, but as Dunsmore points out, the potential is there.

“I was at the Move Conference 2025 (18-19 June), and you saw a breadth of micro-car offerings coming to the market,” he tells us.

Yo-Go and the NanoCars each represent the forms that the new offering coming to market could take. Yo-Go is offering a mobility solution that is in many ways similar to the micro-mobility schemes built around scooters and e-bikes, but that is not who Yo-Go is competing against.

“We are trying to provide an alternative to a car that a scooter or bike can’t address,” Bailey says. “It is lower cost than a full-size EV, with lower CO2 emissions than a full-size car. That is something you wouldn’t get from a bike or scooter. It offers safety, a roll cage, seatbelts, and you can’t fall off. It gives you weather protection from the roof and has space for luggage and passengers.”

The great potential of the “mini-mobility” market lies in its potential to offer a compact, low emission, low price alternative to cars while providing the key advantages people get from car use.

“The reason we believe it can be a unique proposition on the marketplace is its nano-sized, but it’s not a compromise,” Dunsmore says. “We provide air conditioning as standard, which might sound strange, but I have just come back from the south of France, and every person that jumps in your car there says, ‘Thanks for the air conditioning.’ It acts as a heater too, demisting the windows. It makes a big difference when most of our competitors don’t have it.”

The Yo-Go buggy offers seating with more room, 240 litres of boot space, but perhaps most appealingly, it includes a removable battery. At a time when charging infrastructure is still one of the biggest obstacles to customers looking to transition to electric, the ability to remove your battery and charge it in your house is a strong competitive edge.

These advantages come into their own when presented to the unique commercial environment of London.

“In London, car usage is quite strange. 90% of all private vehicle miles are from 9% of the population, and the journeys are very small. 70% of them are under three miles,” Bailey points out. “What we want is to create a close replacement for people who are using cars, but then offer them the advantage that you can fit four of them in a parking space.”

It is a product with potential for a huge impact on congestion. The question is how many cars can these solutions actually take off the road?

“Our obvious competitors are conventional electric vehicles,” Bailey tells us. “We’re not looking at long distance, we only want to use it in a wide 20-mile-an-hour zone. But within that market, we think it’s a compelling proposition.”

Dunsmore points not just to how many cars NanoCars can potentially take off the roads, but at the impact each like-for-like substitution will actually have.

“Because they are smaller, even a direct one-for-one swap results in a vehicle that takes up less space and reduces congestion, helping the environment,” Dunsmore says. “But in cities, especially, there is a generation that is delaying their purchase of a car until later in life. Those people need to move around, and at the moment their options are trains, buses or Lyfts and Ubers.”

There is demand for a solution that moves away from big cars with a single occupant, but the simplicity of an A-to-B drive is still more appealing than trying to tie together car-sharing schemes or various forms of public transport.

“Bringing micro cars into that suite of offerings for cities lets people be more efficient,” Dunsmore says.

Challenges, practical and perceived

But while the potential and demand for microcars or NanoCars is huge, the new sector still has early obstacles to overcome if it hopes to become a widespread transport solution.

“At the moment, the big challenge is getting enough scale that we can provide a reliable, available service,” Bailey tells us. “If you look at Lime Bikes, if I open the app, there’s a good chance of finding a bike within a two- or three-minute walk. We are not yet at that scale. We want to achieve sufficient density. 99% of the time we want people to open the app and find a Yo-Go on their street.”

At the same time, mini-mobility solutions also need to fight a battle of perception. They have a product that offers things people want, but customers need to know that.

“If you look at the history of these vehicles, some of the original ones weren’t much more than one-person milk floats,” Dunsmore says. “These were very basic vehicles. They got a bit of traction in the UK, but that is not what a microcar is today. Just as we saw with electric vehicles, we need to work hard on shifting that perception.”

One factor that may shift the needle is the presence of brands such as Nissan and Renault moving into the market, and the credibility that comes with that.

But ultimately, beyond brand recognition, Bailey argues that it is the environmental impact that is going to turn microcars from a novelty into a mainstream form of transport.

“These produce less CO2 per kilometre than a cyclist does,” Bailey argues. “If you compared that to an EV’s CO2 reduction, you’ll never offset the battery manufacturing. When we look at how we build our cities in the future, and how to reduce our carbon footprint, it will be about making use of the space available. We think the answer is moving to a smaller vehicle that is low carbon, low cost and creates good traffic flow through good use of space.”

A new industry

As well as individual drivers and passengers, both Dunsmore and Bailey are excited about the possibilities of micro-cars in other business sectors.

“Businesses looking to reduce costs and their impact on the environment might be one of the fastest to adopt,” Dunsmore tells us. “We see potential in airports with run-a-round vehicles, or big campuses.”

Bailey also sees potential for micro-cars as a fleet leasing alternative.

“In future, we may offer the ability to lease at a lower cost than a full-size car. Providing that as an option we think could make this form of transport affordable for consumers and businesses,” Bailey says.

He is also looking forward to the ways the range of micro-vehicles can expand in future.

“It’d be great to have more variation. At the moment, we have two seats and space at the back for four bags of shopping,” Bailey says. “We are looking at having a commercial version with enough space for last-mile deliveries or tools for tradesmen. Do that, and suddenly we have a viable alternative to a van. We’d also love to get more seats in for parents with children.”

For now, Yo-Go is looking at expanding its geographic footprint beyond its home in London, maybe even moving into markets with more developed micro-mobility segments.

“We are targeting denser cities such as Oxford, where city council talks have already begun. Bristol and Bath have also expressed an interest,” says Bailey. “We are also looking at the potential of locations such as Berlin and Paris.”

It looks like the Micro-mobility sector could be going full circle.