China’s most exciting car brand is searching for its soul
Between its Bugatti-beating station wagon and almost fully self-driving cars, Zeekr is finding success. Now it has to find an identity
[HANGZHOU] First the Chinese invented firecrackers, and now they’ve created the Zeekr 001 FR. It packs so much horsepower, the average Bugatti driver could only hope for a good look at the broad wing on its tailgate.
An all-electric startup launched in 2021 by 27-year-old Geely Auto, China’s first privately-held car company, Zeekr embodies urgency. In just 44 months it has launched six models out of a planned eight-car line-up and entered 40 markets, including Singapore in August this year. It wasn’t long ago that it took as much time for a car company to develop a single model.
At a two-day press open house in Geely’s coastal Hangzhou home, I drove several Zeekr models, toured an impressively clean assembly plant, and mingled with engineers and product planners – all to understand the brand’s place in an increasingly crowded and chaotic automotive landscape.
Zeekr’s challenge? Topple established players while fending off intense competition from other homegrown startups such as XPeng, Nio and Li Auto. Within that fray, it also has to establish an identity within Geely’s own clutch of disparate brands, which includes legacy nameplates like Lotus and Volvo, Swedish upstart Polestar, a joint venture with Mercedes (Smart) as well as Lynk & Co, itself a startup that Geely launched to fill the space between upscale Volvo and its own mass-market cars.
To get there, Zeekr says it aims to reinvent every product segment it enters. A Bugatti-baiting station wagon is a prime example of that. The 001 FR’s battery pack dumps out so much energy, it could power 97,000 household LED bulbs, meaning it could light up a few HDB blocks by itself.
As you’d imagine, blasting down the short straights of the Ningbo International Circuit in the Zeekr felt a bit like strapping myself to one of China’s Long March rockets, declaring myself invincible and then regretting it instantly.
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With 1,300 horsepower at my disposal, the first time I pinned the accelerator I thought my brains would splatter against the rear window. Yet, after some seat time, a funny thing happened: between the massively powerful brakes, the meaty steering and the traction control system, along with the car’s built-in sense of poise, the 001 FR felt downright controllable. For a driver with ordinary driving skills to find 1,300 horsepower manageable, it takes extraordinary engineering skills.
Given that “FR” stands for “future road”, the label tantalisingly suggests that Zeekr is about to flood the world with electric hypercars. “I have a joke about that. ‘FR’ means ‘for rich!’” Ray Chien, who heads Zeekr’s high performance models division and ran Lynk & Co’s racing series, told me.
Chien’s job is to finetune Zeekr models that reach 100 kmh in a stomach-churning three seconds or less (for the record, the 001 FR needs just 2.08 seconds). In his view, Chinese cars already lead the industry in user interface, voice control and connectivity features. Leading the world in the speed stakes could be next, but I put it to Chien that there has to be a natural limit to that approach. “Surely we won’t see a 2,000 horsepower car?” I asked him. “I think you might,” he replied, smiling.
The day after I scrambled my insides in the 001 FR, I took a ride in a regular 001 equipped with Navigation Zeekr Pilot (NZP), a feature that uses radar sensors and 11 cameras to let the Zeekr drive itself.
The product planner behind the wheel simply told the car where we wanted to go, started us rolling, then pushed a button twice to activate the system. The Zeekr obeyed traffic lights, switched lanes and turned into different streets by itself (and not without signalling each time), and stuck religiously to the speed limit.
Drivers are supposed to keep hold of the wheel, ready to take control back immediately. Beta testers in Hangzhou and Shanghai apparently use the system every day. “It’s just more relaxing, especially in heavy traffic,” the product planner said. Amazingly, Zeekr drivers who don’t have NZP will soon get it. The brand will simply send an over-the-air update to more than 110,000 customers.
I also poked around inside the Zeekr Mix, a multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) with an interior reminiscent of a sophisticated living room, and took a brief but engaging drive in the 7X, Zeekr’s newest creation. The Tesla Model Y rival just went on sale in Europe and will do so in Singapore around July next year.
While Zeekr designed the 7X to compete with BMW’s X3, it offered the media drives in the larger, more expensive X5 for comparison. It turns out that the brand’s engineers benchmark their cars against rivals from one segment higher, hoping it will make them even more competitive.
“How can we exceed the X3 if we don’t aim higher than that car?” a product head asked me. (Product planners decide what attributes a car needs, identify its rivals and how it needs to beat them, then tell the engineers to make it happen.)
Another car in the 7X’s sights? Porsche’s electric Macan. “Porsche, to be honest, is a superhero in the gasoline area,” the product head said. “But on the EV stage, Porsche is not leading that much. Maybe we can become the EV world’s Porsche?”
Zeekr does have more tangible goals. Freshly merged with Lynk & Co, it intends to double its sales to one million cars by the end of 2026. Very likely, it is Porsche’s margins of around 14 per cent that it covets, more so than its image. If you ask me, management would be content if Zeekr merely ranked alongside BMW image-wise, especially since it has yet to make a net profit.
From what I saw in Hangzhou, it almost certainly has the engineering depth to build products on the same level. But what’s also clear is that Zeekr, like a growing number of Chinese brands, is running up against the reality that pure product strength isn’t enough to counter the decades of heritage that Western car makers are increasingly keen to play up.
It’s why Mini shows off images of Twiggy and Paul McCartney driving its cars in the 1960s, or why Rolls-Royce and Ferrari habitually invoke their charismatic founders with the launch of each new model. BMW, Mercedes and Porsche, meanwhile, have racing success to tout, plus a string of classic models to help define their current cars.
To elevate their image accordingly, Chinese brands first need more polish, for all their futuristic features and breathtaking performance. It breaks the spell for a driver to see on his Lotus’ touchscreen, say, that the massage chairs have been “closed” rather than turned off. A team of transcreation specialists, who go beyond translation and adapt language for culture and tone, would be helpful here.
Not having much of its own image outside of China, Zeekr should borrow someone else’s. Samsung’s smartphones skyrocketed in popularity after Ellen DeGeneres used a Galaxy Note 3 to capture a star-studded selfie during the 2014 Oscars after-party that became the most retweeted photo at the time, for example, in a deal that reportedly took three years to negotiate. Imagine if Geely could somehow manage to make James Bond or Ethan Hunt drive a gadget-laden Zeekr on the silver screen. In an FR version, they could handily outrun the bad guys.
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