Chinese manufacturer Geely, which now owns Volvo, launched an entirely new car brand called Lynk & Co. this week.
The first new car is a compact SUV imaginatively named 01, which is very Swedish.
The 01 model, which resembles a mashed up version of Porsche’s Cayenne and Kia’s Sportage, is the first of four new models the brand will launch by 2021.
Underneath the SUV’s design lies Volvo’s Compact Modular Architecture chassis system. It will also be used in Lynk’s sibling vehicles in the next few years.
The Lynk is likely to be a class ahead of its other Chinese rivals, with the car coming from a Volvo-designed 1.5-liter three-cylinder engine or a four-cylinder head unit. The car is also going to be front wheel drive, according to the official literature.
The car is also going to be more connected than most already for sale, with the company teaming up with Microsoft and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba to offer software updates for drivers.
The new digital platform, which allows application programming and vehicle-to-vehicle communication, allows the cars to share data.
As vehicle usage changes over the next few years, it seems the company has acknowledged this and will have car sharing built into the platform from the start.
By using a shared “digital key”, several subscribers from the platform can book the vehicles wherever they are. The company also said it plans to sell the cars to Tesla and other car sharing companies over the next few years.
The car is expected to go on sale in China in 2017, followed by Europe in 2018 and the US after that.
For the Iranian market, Geely’s office was unable to give the Financial Tribune a response on the estimated time of entry.
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