The Chinese cars you've not seen before - driven

Back in 2018, your correspondent spent an eye-opening two days at the Guangdong International Circuit near Guangzhou testing and judging 23 different Chinese cars as part of a Car of the Year test organised by local media. It was memorable for all kinds of weird and wonderful reasons, the quality of the cars on show being one in particular. I had attended a similar test the year before that, and in 2018 the leap forward in the quality of cars was far more noticeable than it would have been had similar tests been run in Europe over the same years. Related articles At the very least, China was on the right track and learning fast about cars with the potential for global export appeal; back then, the designs were clearly ahead of the dynamics. In traditional automotive circles, the gap since that 2018 event to 2024 is almost a full model cycle. Yet looking at the 18 cars from 10 different brands assembled at the Beijing Goldenport Park Circuit, a facility that, like the Guangdong International Circuit before it, is not quite up to Jonathan Palmer’s standards, you would be forgiven for thinking the gap was 20 years and three model generations or more. Some of those models will be plenty familiar, and it would be unfair to refer to them simply as ‘Chinese’ in the same way the class of 2018 was, because all the cars here come from the ever-growing world of Geely, which today has the likes of Lotus and Smart in its portfolio. Indeed, one company official told me: “Geely is not like the other Chinese companies because we’re already global with a strong footprint in the US and EU. It’s not a question of when we’re coming to Europe; we’re there already.” Even so, there are plenty of domestic-market models from Geely’s different brands – and there are enough of them – to act as a barometer for the overall quality of China’s class of 2024. Up first are the Zeekr EVs. Less than three years since delivering its first car, Zeekr is bidding to become a global brand that just happens to be from China, where it launched first, but which carried out its key design and engineering work in Gothenburg, Sweden. One official said: “We do the high-value stuff in Europe and the low-value stuff in China.”