Zeekr launches 007 sedan for under $30K, 540 mile range, over 50k pre-orders | Hacker News Reader

Zeekr launches 007 sedan for under $30K, 540 mile range, over 50k pre-orders

electrek.co

35 pointsTerretta26 comments

I wonder what the Australian government’s excuse will be to make it impossible to import one of these like the rest of the affordable EVs you might actually want from China and elsewhere around Asia and Europe. Instead we get a few $40k MGs and Hyundais that would make you miserable then a $30,000 gap followed by Teslas and Polestars.

We did get the BYD and I’ve driven one on a roadtrip from Sydney to far north Queensland and back and it was actually really good. Pity it ended up so expensive compared to competitive ICE cars.

Hoping once the majority of China’s auto market swaps to electric of some sort we can start getting the cheap hatchback competition and hopefully some cheaper hot hatch style EVs to meet the lower end of the market at around this $30,000 price tag.

I thought MG and Polestar now belong to Chinese companies (SAIC and Geely), and (some models of) MG are just Roewe with its logo changed?

It’s not exactly a AU$30k gap from an MG at AU$40!

List price of a base Model 3 is $61,900.

Minus any rebates available in your state. In SA that’s a $3000 rebate and three years free registration.

I wonder how the plethora of no name brands will hold on long term. Car is not a phone. You can't just make 100k units and forget that product even existed after End of Production. People will want maintenance, diagnostic, software support. People will want parts after few years.

Even big boys like Hyundai have problems with parts as we saw here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783355

It will be rough in the beginning but when China starts exporting in volume it will get solved for sure. Building great cars is the hard part. Companies that can do that can also figure out the easy stuff like brand names, maintenance, etc.

Universal parts is one solution. If 80% of the parts work in 80% of the cars, you solved a huge portion of the problem.

Capitalism only encourages economies of scale to a low level. Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel and even at minority market saturation switch to in-house vertical CPU. Mobile of course made a huge impact but wasn't a market leader globally.

And once being tied to a vendor there's no real incentive for right to repair etc.

"minority market saturation"

let's stop repeating this nonsense. You wouldn't say LVMH has minority market saturation in the clothing industry, because it doesn't compete in the global clothing industry. It competes in the global luxury goods market, where it has a dominant market majority control. Similarly, Apple has, and for a long time has had, a near monopoly on the luxury electronics market.

I was responding to 80% of parts in 80% of cars and in that context is certainly a minority.

Finally some price competition in the EV space.

Somebody gets it.

I predict that when China makes better and cheaper cars than the west, the west will put up protectionist barriers.

That'll be bad, because then the western car markets will fall behind.

One thing from a consumer perspective (brand perspective) is chinese cars have very bad company names eg., BYD, Zeekr, Xpheng, Geely if compared to other brands from other countries like Toyota, Hyundai, Audi, Ford, TATA etc.

Personally, I would not roam around with 'Xpheng' name etched on my car.

'007' seems like a great name though.

At least here in Australia it’s a popular option to de-badge your BYD removing the ‘Build Your Dreams’ from the back hatch.

It’s only bad if you aren’t used to it. When Japanese brands tried to break into automotive world, they sounded weird too. Xiomi and Hiawei don’t sound too different to Samsung and Nokia these days.

You kind of proved GP's point by misspelling both names. They are Xiaomi and Huawei. The fact that you misspelled them isn't surprising, as both have "foreign" spellings compared with the Japanese brands like Toyota, Honda, Nissan. X is rarely used in English, and they have paired and less common vowel pairs. Both are also not pronounced phonetically, which is also true of the the Japanese brands but the approximation is arguably closer for them. Certainly for some of the brands sounding like Amazon 3rd-party re-resellers is a big mark against them.

Lol you overanalyzed it. I fat-fingered in mobile. U is next to i and unlike Nissan or Toyota, my swipe keyboard does not recognize Huawei yet.

They’ll just come to the states under a different name.

XPeng is actually similar to Mercedes-Benz, or Ford, the brand is just the founder's name :)

I remember reading a proposed policy by the Swedish left party (old communisr party. Now more or less where the social democrats were 35 years ago). They figured that once you are already paying upwards of 800.000SEK the state subsidies were not the main concern. They wanted to cap the subsidy so that you could only get it fully for cars below 400.000SEK.

I think that is a marvellous idea.

I agree and this will also put European countries at odds. Portugal and Greece will want cheap imports unlike Germany and France that want to protect their failing domestic car industry.

Well China already makes better and cheaper EV cars than the west.

Not many are yet imported or sold in the US or europe though. Yet...

I would be surprised if the James Bond people don't take issue with the 007 moniker. There have been "007 Edition" BMWs in the past, and given the spy's association with cars, it could be argued that a "Zeekr 007" could be confused as being associated with the movie franchise.

"What are you driving around in these days?"

"It's a Double-Oh Seven"

"Huh?"

They may take issue. They can't take complete ownership over a number though

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