Who is Zeekr?

Beijing, September 2020. The motor show has been pushed back five months by the pandemic, and on the Lynk & Co stand there is a long, low, five-door car with no grille and flush door handles. Lynk & Co is one of the many car brands owned by Geely, the Chinese group behind Volvo, and you will not find it in any Singapore showroom. It is called the Zero, it is a concept, and the people on the stand say it will go into production next year with a range of 700 km. It never does. Not under that name.¹²

Six months later, in March 2021, Geely announced a new brand for premium electric cars. In April the Zero reappeared at the Shanghai show, down to the badge, as the Zeekr 001. The car had not changed. The company around it had.³⁴

The car that changed its name

If you have never heard of Lynk & Co, that is normal here. Geely set it up in 2016 with Volvo as a partner and a head office in Gothenburg, to sell younger, cheaper cars built on Volvo parts, mostly in China and later in parts of Europe. It has never been sold in Singapore. The Zero was supposed to be its first electric car. Stefan Rosén, the Swede who ran Lynk & Co design at the time, later said the plan for a new brand was known early on and the car was meant to look like a Lynk & Co anyway, because that badge already stood for something in China. The design brief from Geely was four words long: no more boring EVs.⁵⁶

The new company was set up in March 2021 with Geely's founder Li Shufu as chairman and RMB 2 billion from the group to get it going. Zeekr says the name is Generation Z plus geek. In China it is Jike. The first car was launched on 15 April 2021 at the Zeekr Intelligent Factory in Hangzhou Bay, outside Ningbo, a plant built for 300,000 cars a year, and by June the whole of that year's production had been spoken for. The first customer cars rolled out in October.³⁷⁸⁹

The 001 was a shooting brake, a long estate with a sloping roof, nearly five metres long and sitting on a wheelbase longer than most seven-seat SUVs. Nobody mass-produced electric shooting brakes in 2021. Geely said that was the point.⁶¹⁰

The accountant

The man Li Shufu put in charge was An Conghui, who goes by Andy outside China. He had joined Geely in 1996 with a diploma in accounting from a college in Hubei, when Geely was a refrigerator-parts firm that had only just started building motorcycles. He worked his way through the engineering side, ran the chassis and components businesses, became chief engineering officer, then a vice president, and from December 2011 president of Geely Holding. By the time Zeekr was founded he had already helped set up Lynk & Co and sat on the Geely Auto board. He is listed on Zeekr's own papers as a co-founder.¹¹¹²

Geely is worth a sentence for anyone who only knows the badges. Zhejiang Geely Holding is Li Shufu's company in Hangzhou, and over twenty years it has bought Volvo Cars, taken a stake in Proton and Lotus, set up Polestar with Volvo, bought the maker of London's black cabs, and gone halves on smart with Mercedes. Zeekr was the piece Geely built itself rather than bought.¹³

An ran Zeekr through its listing and its return home, and in August 2025 Li Shufu stepped down as chairman of Geely Auto and handed him the seat. Since January 2026 he has been chief executive of the whole Geely holding company, with Zeekr one of the businesses under him. The man who signed off on the 001 now signs off on everything.¹⁴

The family platform

Under every Zeekr is a set of parts called SEA, the Sustainable Experience Architecture, which Geely showed in late 2020 as an electric platform that could stretch from a city car to a van. If that sounds familiar, it should. The Volvo EX30, the smart #5, the Polestar 4 and the Lynk & Co Z10 are all SEA cars. The Zeekr X, the small SUV we have reviewed, is the EX30's twin under the skin.⁶¹⁵

What Zeekr does with that platform is where the brand shows its personality. The 009, a luxury MPV launched in late 2022, was the first car in the world with CATL's Qilin battery, the cell-to-pack design that let the 001 claim 1,000 km on a single charge a few months later. The 001 FR of 2023 had four motors, 1,247 hp, a claimed 2.02 seconds to 100 km/h and a tank turn, where the wheels on each side spin in opposite directions and the car rotates on the spot. Zeekr built 99 a month and had Kimi Räikkönen hand over the first ones. In December 2021 it signed up to build Waymo's robotaxi.^1617183

Design is still done in Gothenburg, where Zeekr's studio sits under Stefan Sielaff, with engineering and the factories in Zhejiang.¹⁹

Wall Street, briefly

On 10 May 2024 Zeekr listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It sold 21 million shares at US$21 and raised about US$441 million, the biggest American listing by a Chinese company in three years, and the fourth Chinese EV maker on a US exchange after NIO, Li Auto and XPENG.²⁰²¹

The numbers that year were the best it has had. Zeekr delivered 222,123 cars in 2024, up 87 per cent, with the 7X SUV passing 30,000 in its first 75 days and the 001 passing a quarter of a million since launch. It also bought control of Lynk & Co, the sister brand whose concept car had become the 001, taking 20 per cent from Geely Auto and Volvo's 30 per cent to get to 51. From February 2025 the two badges reported as one company called Zeekr Group, which is why Zeekr's sales figures from then on usually come with Lynk & Co's attached.²²²³

The year on the exchange also brought Zeekr its one real public row. In August 2024 it launched a new model-year 001 six months after the previous one, and owners who had just bought the old car were not happy. An Conghui said in public that the company could have communicated its plans better, and a year later Zeekr published its update calendar in advance and promised at least a year between versions.³

Then Geely took it back. In May 2025, twelve months after the listing, Geely Auto offered to buy the shares it did not own. The agreement was signed in July, shareholders could take US$26.87 a share or Geely stock, and on 22 December 2025 Zeekr asked the exchange to stop trading. It is now a wholly owned part of Geely Auto, which also means a different boss day to day: Gan Jiayue, the group's finance-trained chief executive, runs the merged Geely and Zeekr businesses while An looks after the holding company above them.²⁴²⁵¹⁴

The half-millionth Zeekr, a 009, came off the line in June 2025, 44 months after the first. The brand's own 2025 target of 320,000 cars was missed by a distance, with Zeekr's own sales flat through the year while the Lynk & Co side of the group grew, and the newest car, the 9X, is a plug-in hybrid rather than a pure EV, the first in the range.³²⁶

Out of China

Zeekr went to Europe before it went anywhere else. The plan was laid out at the Shanghai show in April 2023 by Spiros Fotinos, a twenty-year Toyota man hired to run Zeekr Europe: start in Sweden and the Netherlands, where people already bought EVs, sell online, and be in most of western Europe by 2026. The 001 and the X went on pre-sale in June 2023 at €59,490 and €44,990, the first ZEEKR Center opened in the Gallerian mall in central Stockholm that November, and the first European customers took delivery in the Netherlands in December.²⁷²⁸²⁹

Right-hand drive came in 2024. The first right-hand-drive X was handed over in Thailand on 1 August 2024, the same day the car launched in Singapore, and Hong Kong, Macau, Australia and Malaysia followed. In Malaysia the 7X is now assembled at Tanjong Malim, in the same industrial park as Proton. By the end of 2024 Zeekr counted more than 40 countries and 538 sales and service points, and it had just opened its 500th showroom. That one is in Singapore.³⁰³¹²²

Leng Kee Road

The Singapore distributor is Premium Automobiles, which has sold Audi here since 1999 and is run by its president Hadi Widjaja Tanaga and managing director Lee Hoe Lone. The Zeekr deal was signed on 28 December 2023, reported in The Straits Times the next morning, and came with a promise that the showroom at Leng Kee and the service centre at Ubi would be Zeekr-only buildings, not corners of the Audi operation. The same group went on to bring XPENG and Deepal to Singapore.³²³³

The launch was at the ArtScience Museum on 1 August 2024, with the X at S$199,999 for the rear-drive car and S$214,999 for the all-wheel drive. The first owners got their keys three weeks later; the first one on record is a 44-year-old called Mr Lee who took the AWD because the chargers had arrived in his estate.³⁴³⁵

On 28 November 2024 the two-storey Zeekr Centre opened at 9 Leng Kee Road. Zeekr counted it as its 500th store in the world, with 447 in China and 53 outside, and used the day to launch the 009 here at S$409,999 for seven seats and S$419,999 for six, dual motor only. The service centre, Zeekr House, is at 53 Ubi Road 1.³⁶³⁷

September 2025 brought the 7X, the mid-size SUV, and the X Urban, the version of the small car with its motor turned down to 110 kW so it qualifies for a Category A COE. Premium handed over the hundredth 7X at the launch event itself. By August 2026 the 7X had passed a thousand local sales and Zeekr marked two years here with a six-month showcase in the Level 2 atrium at Jewel Changi Airport, the same place it held its first roadshow in 2024. It runs to 31 January 2027.³⁸³⁹⁴⁰

What it is like to live with one

We lived with the X Urban in September 2026, in grey. Our review found a small SUV that looks like nothing else in the carpark, a navy and cream cabin that feels a class above its price, one of the nicest steering wheels we have held, and a Cat A motor that keeps the whole thing sensible. The back seat and boot are tight and the driver monitor beeps at you for looking up. We scored it 7.5, with a Soul score of 7.⁴¹

Five years is not long for a car company. In that time Zeekr has gone from a concept wearing the wrong badge to half a million cars, a Wall Street listing it has already left, a design studio in Sweden, showrooms on four continents and one on Leng Kee Road. What it has not yet done is settle what it is for. The 001 FR says it wants to be the fastest thing on the road. The X says it wants to be the nicest small car in the multi-storey. The 9X says hybrids are fine after all. The one thing every Zeekr we have seen agrees on is the brief from 2021. None of them is boring to look at.