Hangzhou, China – ZEEKR, a premium electric mobility brand, has today announced a range of upgrades to its 001 vehicle, signaling a bold vision for the future of luxury driving and autonomy.
At its first ZEEKR Experience Day, and less than one year after the first products were delivered to customers in China, ZEEKR confirmed that 001 models will be subject to an extensive OTA update that covers driver comfort, cockpit interface, and smart driving technologies. ZEEKR has also announced a number of hardware improvements to the body and chassis of 001 for the 2022 model year.
The ZEEKR 001 is now the world’s first production car equipped with two 7nm autonomous driving chips. This state-of-the-art technology enables the 001 to self-adapt to its surroundings at speeds of up to 130kph. In testing environments, the 001 has been shown to automatically slow when it detects pedestrians or non-motor vehicles approaching. The 001 will also automatically detect a car door open on the side of the road or a truck approaching on the side and will turn its wheels slightly to avoid a possible collision.
The latest upgrades also include a high-performance 8155 Snapdragon microchip which has optimized over 200 key items of user control functions within the cockpit.
ZEEKR’s brand-new intelligent driving system enables users to switch among different driving modes and has a distributed traction control system designed specifically for pure electric vehicles. This new system includes signal transmission and processing that is 10 times faster than most existing systems, bringing computing down to milliseconds. This improves acceleration performance by 31% on harsh road surfaces or in snow and ice conditions, while also increasing the maximum controllable speed. This newly updated driving system will give users the option to switch between rear-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, and real-time adaptive four-wheel-drive systems based on the current road conditions.
ZEEKR Business Update
ZEEKR successfully completed a Pre-A round of external funding in August 2021, led by Intel Capital with $500 million. Other investors include CATL, Bilibili, Cathay Fortune Group, and Boyu Capital.
In December 2021, ZEEKR announced a collaboration with Waymo on the development of a new pure electric vehicle for deployment in the Waymo One autonomous ride-hailing fleet in the United States. A new purpose-built commercial mobility vehicle is being designed and developed at ZEEKR’s R&D facility in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Earlier this year, ZEEKR confirmed a collaboration with Mobileye, an Intel company, to expand their strategic technology partnership with a goal to deliver the world’s first consumer autonomous consumer vehicles with L4 capabilities by 2024.
ZEEKR continues to prioritize and fulfill local market customer orders ahead of a planned European roll-out from 2023, where it will ramp up capacity at the ZEEKR Intelligent Factory – one of the world’s most advanced vehicle facilities – to deal with unprecedented demand for the 001. It has already delivered its 20,000th vehicle in May of 2022, 217 days from its first delivery in October of 2021, making it the fastest EV company in China to achieve such a target.
