Yahoo Autos Lynk & Co Wants to Build a Car You'll Love as Much as Your Smartphone
It's not often you get to go to the launch of a brand-new automaker. Tesla's launch party might have been a great night in Silicon Valley back in 2003, but Lynk & Co's story starts at a different level, with a global product promised to hit the mainstream market just a year from now. Despite coming from China, the 01 is packed with European technology, and that will be the key selling point when it comes to conquering the western markets in 2018. That's ambitious on its own-but the whole idea is way more complex and bold than that.
Simply put, Lynk & Co, owned by Chinese automaker Geely, wants to deliver "design-driven and very competitively priced cars." Geely promises a vehicle built to the quality standards of the other automaker it owns (Volvo), a straightforward task. But then, they start talking about delivering the car right to you through the power of the internet, getting rid of dealers, abolishing model years as well as options lists, and helping you rent your leased car to your neighbors when you're not using it.
Are you scratching your head yet? About the only predictable thing is the model names-the second offering, due in a few years, will be called 02.
Geely started in 1997, and soon became China's largest independent carmaker-a company wealthy enough to buy and reinvent Volvo six years ago. Today, Geely boasts a 10,000-strong research and development team, ten production facilities and four design studios, including one in Los Angeles and another in Barcelona. The latter designed the new London Taxi, after Geely acquired the remaining stocks of the British company in 2013.
With all these resources and the know-how purchased in Sweden, Geely won't need to enter the European and American markets in the traditional way. The way that Japanese and Korean manufacturers broke into the U.S. market back in the day might have worked out in the long run, but Geely has no time for that. Instead, the Chinese giant has set up China Euro Vehicle Technology AB, staffed by a bunch of Volvo engineers and led by Mats Fägerhag, the former head of R&D for Saab in Gothenburg. Three years on, CEVT completed the all-new, fully scalable Compact Modular Architecture vehicle platform.
CMA will underpin Volvo's upcoming compacts (starting with the XC40), as well as a whole bunch of Geely vehicles for China, and all of Lync & Co's upcoming international products. Because it was designed and developed in Sweden, it's made mostly of hyper-mega-ultra-super-strong steels, ready to pass any crash test China, the EU or America can throw at it. Electrification won't be a problem either: all of Lynk's cars will be available as hybrids, plug-in hybrids and full EVs with all-wheel drive. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
This is a car site, so some of you might want to know that the Lynk 01 we saw at the launch packed Volvo's as-yet-unannounced 180-hp three-cylinder turbo and an electric motor for a combined output of 220 horsepower. It also had a 7-speed dual clutch gearbox and a four-link rear suspension, while future Lynks will employ twist-beam systems as well. That's some pretty advanced stuff, though Geely doesn't think its intended customers-young, stylish people who don't have a lot to spend-will care about chassis details.
Lynk & Co sounds like a fashion brand because Geely wanted it to sound like a fashion brand. Forget the similarity to "Lincoln;" Geely wanted something very "digital" and fresh. They also knew the world already has plenty of car brands, so to launch one, first, they had to find an approach that suggests the exact opposite.
As Lynk & Co CEO and former Opel and Volvo veteran Alain Visser explained, the mobile industry has changed more in five years than the car itself has in the past 50. This, Visser said, prompted the new automaker to look at things in a completely different way. Three years later, they came up with this fully-connected digital car built for young people who live in megacities. A "smartphone on wheels" with a very different customer experience attached to it. A product attractive to Chinese millennials but with Northern European styling, ready for America. The Lynk & Co 01.
The heart of all Lynk cars is not the engine, but Ericsson's 4G system, which keeps the car connected to the cloud 24/7 without needing a phone. This secure high-speed network supports an open (HTML5-based) platform developed by Microsoft and Chinese e-commerce empire Alibaba. This digital environment will give third-party businesses the opportunity to develop apps for the car, making the touch screen behave exactly like your smartphone. Lynk & Co will have its own app store, while the data collected by the car will also speed up the automaker's R&D and improve your GPS navigation and other features through over-the-air software updates. And when it's time for a tune-up, Lynk & Co will simply pick up the vehicle when it's convenient for you and take it to a Volvo service center, timing maintenance visits based on data collected during normal use.
What can make Lynk & Co cars particularly affordable is the possibility of car sharing. According to the nascent automaker, young people don't want to own anything bigger than an iPad nowadays. So if you can lease a 01 using their subscription model and rent it out to others by sharing its digital key through a dedicated app, you can get close to having a free car with none of the hassles of traditional car ownership.
Lynk & Co won't operate traditional dealerships in Europe and America, either, though it will use dealerships in China. It's an attempt to cut costs, as is the company's no-options pricing scheme. Lynk will sell cars online at a fixed price; once you've checked out the product at a brand store or a shopping mall, you can order it online and they will deliver it to your address. With only a few packages available, Lynk saves a lot on the manufacturing side, while customers will never have to search or wait for the equipment they desire. The cars won't even have model years. As Visser says, once you're done with your winter collection, you just jump into your summer car. It's supposed to be that easy.
If all of this sounds a bit blurry, that's only because I'm not convinced that this Chinese-Swedish supergroup has this completely figured this out just yet. They've got a proper geek, David Green, working on the digital side, and right now they definitely have a car that will launch in China next year, with three more body styles signed approved for production later. Lynk wants to launch at least one new model every year. Given that they've already built a four-door concept car, I'm guessing the Lynk & Co. 02 will be a sedan of some sort.
What's for sure is that Lynk cars will boost traffic at Volvo service centers, give economy of scale to Volvo's compact platform and Chinese factory, and play a huge role in Geely's expansion, which will continue in the west as the London Taxi's aluminum structure becomes the base for a whole family of zero-emission commercial vehicles.
But it all starts with this, the 01, an SUV ready for "urban adventures," whatever that means:
If you thought "that's a Cayenne with Ferrari headlamps," trust me, we've been trough this. I also see bits of Citroën DS here and there, but overall, I still think that the Lynk division of Geely's 400 designers did a good job with their clean sheet of paper, especially given that the car's goal of popularity both in China and the West.
When somebody asked Peter Horbury if he worries that the car looks like a lifted Ferrari FF, he laughed. To him, that's a compliment.
Lots of vertical lines, glossy/matte two-tone paint jobs and an interior that will remind you of everyone's best friend, a smartphone. The 01 is a rolling internet device with five seats and a 360-degree camera system. Priced like a Kia, there must be a market for this thing.
Chairman Li has certainly started something that feels the opposite of boring. And the opposite of what we think of as the typical product of the Chinese auto industry.
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