Zeekr 001 Long Range RWD 2024 review | First Drive

Zeekr, another brand new electric car maker, is a company that you may be more familiar with than you think. That's because its parent firm, Geely, also owns Volvo, Polestar and Smart, (loosely) backing Zeekr’s claim to be "built on a decade of European experience." Several decades, if we've done our sums right, and it has a Gothenburg-based design and R&D centre pouring cement on the claim.

The company's name could also only have come from the airy fairy, open-plan office of a European PR Team. 'Zeekr' – engage eye rolling – is distilled from a trio of brand pillars that any self respecting startup couldn’t do without. 'ZE', we’re told, is short  for "Zero, the starting point of infinite possibilities," 'E' represents the "Evolving electric era" and 'KR' relates to "Krypton, a rare gas that emits light when electrified." And that, friends, is time you'll never get back.

It's best to forget about the marketing and focus on the cars that, in the great tradition of Chinese startup manufacturers, look so credible you'd swear they came from a company that’s been pumping them out for years. 

Actually, Zeekr launched in March 2021, came to Europe (Sweden and the Netherlands) in 2023 and has been expanding through the continent and beyond ever since, currently closing in on 300,000 sales. It’s not in the UK yet, but expect that to change soon.

So, where to begin? The company’s inaugural model, the 001, seems as good a place as any; we test it here in Long Range RWD form.

It's no bad thing that the Zeekr has the hydroformed lines of an EV built for efficiency. Frog-eye headlights and a blank grille give it a sporty front, while the pinched flanks and black roofline take weight away from a body in white hiding a massive battery. 

Zeekr calls the 001 a "shooting brake," but in person, it's more like a fastback with an efficiency-delivering sloping roof. You get the obligatory pop-out door handles and nice lighting; the 3D rear illumination will fool many people into thinking the car you're driving is very high-end, certainly it caused a minor stir at my local Dutch food emporium car park with shoppers keen to know exactly what it was. 

But that could also be a problem. BMW, Mercedes and Audi models are Russian dolls; even the motoring-uninterested can spot the three apart, and each tells us a little about its owner. BMWs are great-driving cars bought by success-hungry go-getters, Mercs are luxurious and perhaps preferred by the more ‘seasoned’ driver, and Audi walks the line between both while sliding lower under the radar. Zeekr says precisely nothing about you, a problem in the UK because, we can be a tad brand-snobby. 

There's a good car hiding under the Zeekr's shapely lines, but its driving aids and safety systems do an excellent job of hiding it.

Some of this is not Zeekr's doing. Yes, legislation is to blame. To avoid being chimed into submission by an array of warning tones, you must turn off the lane assist, attention assist and the speed warning system (with a couple of button presses and a menu scroll, the latter not quickly done when driving) every time you get in the car. 

But it's something you absolutely need to do because the Zeekr's systems – attention assist in particular – are sensitive enough to have you banging your head off the steering wheel in frustration seconds from departure. Merely glancing at the infotainment screen immediately triggers the iron fist of the attention assist, which begs the question: how do you turn it off without being incessantly bleeped at? We never did find out. 

Meanwhile, putting your hands on the steering wheel – something we encourage – can also trigger the system if they are placed at 12 o’clock.

But if the warning bongs are aggravating, the self-drive system can be terrifying. Snatching the steering wheel out of your hands like you're caught in a hostile takeover, accelerating hard towards the car in front before slamming on the brakes with colossal force, turning you and your Zeekr into a slow-moving chicane for the car behind. Not to mention making you look like a shockingly bad driver. Traffic in other lanes sends it into a tizzy and, more than once, the system gave up the ghost completely, flashing up ‘not operational’ or words to that effect on the dashboard. 

By contrast, while the self-drive is far too responsive, the buttons with which you control it with aren't reactive enough. Prods on the steering wheel often do nothing at all. It's a head-scratcher, because Volvo – which lives under the same Geely umbrella, so Zeekr should have access to the same tech – mastered active cruise yonks ago. 

And that's not the end of the 001's wows. Its regenerative brakes are infuriatingly difficult to modulate smoothly on the motorway; balancing braking force by bleeding in the accelerator isn't possible. No matter what you do, lifting off the throttle feels like you're in a space capsule coming out of orbit as the brakes slam on – you'd swear a parachute has unfurled behind the car. 

Annoyingly, when there's no traffic to upset the self-drive and regen, the Zeekr is a relaxing cruiser – there's zero motor noise, it feels extremely planted and there's decent punch, we can’t see any reason why you’d need to upgrade from the 272PS (200kW) Long Range (0-62mph in 7.2 seconds) to the 544PS (400kW) Performance AWD which does 0-62mph in a lung-emptying 3.8 seconds. Only the wind noise from the frameless doors upset these precious moments of assistance-aid-free peace.  

But it doesn't last. In town, the brakes – plot twist – suffer from the opposite problem you encounter on the motorway. Here, they don't stop hard enough. Or at all. At times, even the car's emergency brakes lose their nerve and slam on the anchors before the regen has bothered to engage. Beyond frustrating. 

And, again, it is all the more annoying because the Zeekr is otherwise a relaxing machine to shuffle in, with instant, silent power available when you need it. 

It's never exactly what you'd call fun, though. It handles neatly enough, and you do get a faint sense that it's rear-wheel drive, as the rear steps out (very briefly before the stability control snaps it back into shape) like your captaining a super tanker, driving the car through a chain of command rather than directly through the controls. 

It sounds vicious, but the best bits of the Zeekr 001 indeed come when you get out. Maximum charging speeds of 200kW mean you can squirt kilowattage in at an alarming rate – 10-80 per cent charges give you time for a leisurely coffee but not a slow-paced lunch  – and the car's 373-mile range was entirely believable during the mild September when we had the keys.

Inside, the Zeekr 001 feels like a match for anything Volkswagen has to offer in terms of quality, and the company has managed to inject its own sense of character, but a lot of the controls are hair-pullingly fiddly. 

Perhaps the most worrying thing for VW and the like is Zeekr's excellent material quality, with padded (we're sure fake) leather used to cover large portions of the dashboard complemented with brass-like trim materials. Mood lighting that shines lava-like from behind the perforated trims on the inner doors is particularly fetching – we can't remember seeing anything like it anywhere else. 

There is still room for improvement. Lower plastics need to be more up to scratch (so less scratchy) like the rest of the interior, and while the brassy trims look great, they feel plasticky. 

The controls could also do with a rethink. The current obsession for having screen-controlled air vents and wing mirrors has us weeping – like inverting the controls on your laptop touchpad; it makes everything needlessly tricky. Also, the strip of touch-sensitive buttons above the car's charging pad are easily brushed accidentally, as we found when we opened the boot when sitting in traffic. 

Practicality-wise, there's nothing much to complain about – once you’ve successfully gained access, anyway. The Zeekr's door handles are supposed to present themselves as you approach the car, but sometimes they don't. In which case, you have to prod the handle’s touch-sensitive ridges and wait for them to slide out, a quirk (not) best sampled in driving rain. Our car also had a habit of setting off its alarm when we opened the boot, a surefire way to win friends in the neighbourhood. 

Once you load the car, having avoided setting the alarm off and successfully opened the driver’s door, the Zeekr is a comfortable car to motor along with multi-adjustable electric front seats, a backbench that will carry three big adults and a 539-litre boot that has all the features you’d hope for and is a more practical space than you’d find in a same-size saloon.

Use Apple CarPlay or Android Auto – as almost everyone does – and the system fills the car's big centre screen rather than portioning off a tiny section of the display like in other cars. The large centre display and visor-shaped digital instrument binnacle have the high-def graphics you'd expect of a European rival.

You won't feel penalised for using the car's built-in systems. The centre screen is intelligent and responsive, understanding the same gestures as your smartphone and complying with them instantaneously. The myriad of menus can take a bit of navigating, but such complaints are a well-trodden path and no worse than you'll find in the likes of a Volvo EX30.

Having said that, the standard fit eight-speaker Yamaha stereo isn't quite up to Volvo standards with a sound that lacks the clarity and thump of a top-end Swedish system, although it's marginally better than a basic BMW unit.

The Chinese car market is so formidable that we have come to expect every car to hail from the East to feel like its maker has been building them for decades – but the Zeekr 001 reminds us that car building is not easy. 

In fairness, outside and in, it looks like the finished article, but from behind the wheel when on the move, it is anything but. The self-drive tech needs a massive overhaul, and Zeekr should resist reinventing the wheel at every opportunity – sticky-out door handles, manual air vents and conventional buttons work very well, they don’t need changing.  

Chip away at the barnacle of pitfalls, though, and there is a good machine lurking underneath. Just one that, for now, is far too well hidden to worry the competition. We’d hope the car – or its successor – is far improved when it eventually lands in the UK.