Geely’s new premium brand Zeekr, a sister company to Lynk & Co and likewise co-developed in Sweden, has launched its first fully electric sedan, the Zeekr 007, at the Guangzhou auto show. In less than 30 minutes, over 5.000 preorders were registered for this 4,8 m long sedan that sprints in 5,4 to 2.84 seconds to 100 km/h, which is offered at a starting price of 229.900 yuan (€29.323).
The Zeekr 007 is a sizeable D-segment family sedan playing in the league of the ET5, that other Chinese premium brand, Nio, or the German BMW i4 eDrive. It is based on the 800-volt PMA2+ platform derived from Geely’s Sustainable Experience Architecture (SEA) platform. That underpins the first Zeekr introduced in Europe, the shooting brake 001, the 009 MPV, the compact Zeekr X and its relatives, the Volvo EX30, and the Smart #1.
The Zeekr 007 is what we call in Europe ‘a large family car’ and in America ‘a midsize sedan’ with 4.865 mm in length, 1.900 mm in width, 1.450 mm in height, and a wheelbase of 2.928 mm. Still, it is slightly shorter than the 4,95 m shooting brake version.
It comes with 310 kW (415 hp) rear-wheel drive or 475 kW (636 hp) all-wheel drive and batteries delivering ranges between 688 and 870 km according to somewhat optimistic Chinese CLTC standards. According to Zeekr, the car can charge 610 km of range in merely 15 minutes due to the 800 V architecture it only shares with the Zeekr 001FR, the brand’s top-performing sports version.
Large part die-casting
Like Tesla’s boss Elon Musk wants to do to make manufacturing of its models cheaper, streamlining the technique of die-casting large parts of the car’s underbody in almost one piece is what Zeekr is already doing with the 009 and 007.
They share a 7.200-ton die-casting press for making a one-piece die-cast rear-end aluminum body, meaning 84 parts less needed and cutting the number of welds by 820. The company claims the result is less vibration and noise.
Like the other Zeekrs, the cockpit of the 007 is quite Spartan in design, with a large OLED touchscreen and hardware featuring a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8295 chip and two Nvidia Drive Orin chips capable of 508 Tops, which means 508 trillion operations per second. The car’s ‘eyes and ears ‘ are a LiDAR, 12 HD cameras, five millimeter-wave radars, and 12 ultra-sonic radars.
The market launch and start of deliveries in China is scheduled for January 2024. When we’ll see the Zeekr 007 wash ashore in Europe hasn’t been specified yet.
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