Before he co-founded Amble, Julian Hoenig spent his days designing the Apple Watch and Vision Pro. Now he’s turned his eye toward something considerably more open-air: a street-legal electric buggy that draws its lineage not from any current EV on the market, but from NASA’s 1971 lunar rover.
The logic makes complete sense when you see it. The Amble One doesn’t hide what it is. Its aluminum frame and skateboard-style chassis sit fully exposed. Cork covers the touchpoints. There’s a flat windshield. That’s more or less it. The weight is 992 pounds. Top speed is 40 mph. Under European L7e rules, it can drive on public roads without doors, panels, or any of the safety theater that makes conventional cars so heavy.
The backstory is as interesting as the machine itself. Amble was co-founded by Hoenig alongside Adrien Roose, former CEO of Cowboy (the Belgian e-bike brand that made a lot of people reconsider urban transportation), and hotelier José António Uva, who spent 14 years turning a sprawling Portuguese estate into one of Europe’s most lauded rural retreats. The company’s first customers aren’t commuters or early adopters — they’re Amangiri, Mustique Island, and Six Senses Les Bordes. Resort guests will be riding these between villas.
At $25,000, it’s priced for a specific kind of buyer. But it’s the thinking behind it that’s worth paying attention to: what does an EV look like when you stop optimizing for familiarity and start optimizing for honesty?