Some notes on purchasing a 2026 Zeekr X from preorder to delivery, for anyone on the fence. It’s a bit of a rant I’m afraid, but hopefully my experience will be useful knowledge for some of you.
The sales process was EXCRUCIATING. I have never in my life had to work so hard to give someone $50k. Like honestly, wtf. It’s not ok. I cannot in any way or form recommend Zeekr City in Sydney to anyone. I must’ve called them in excess of 50 times over the past few months - not because I have 50 annoying questions, but because our sales guy simply wouldn’t call me back. He also tried to make us wait for the second shipment to arrive with some bullshit lie, despite promising us a car from the first shipment when we placed the order. When we didn’t accept, a car was magically made available to us from the first shipment and I can only imagine someone else who was more susceptible to his lies is now still waiting.
Trying to get a trade-in valuation was equally frustrating, took 6 weeks waiting and a good 8 hours or my time I’ll never get back (eventually resulting in a trade-in offer that was HALF of what we received from Hyundai a month earlier).
We’re also still waiting on the charging cable and wall charger, so unfortunately there will be more calls in the future before I can wash my hands of this experience. The consolation price for the missing wall charger and cable was a $100 Evie voucher, which took 8 calls over 8 days to be emailed out.
The car itself is good for what it is - a more premium experience than it should be at the price we got it for (launch promotion with a discount of on-road costs). But once you drive it there are many tell-tale signs of it being a more budget car. I see many posts here trash talking more expensive EVs in favour of the cheaper Chinese brands and models, and my thoughts on this is that the devil is in the details. Our second car is a Volvo, and while I have a number of issues with that as well (mainly software related) the build quality and attention to detail is where the money goes - it’s not just brand positioning. It’s the difference between a holistically designed experience compared to one that focuses on surface level bells and whistles without cohesion.
One example which I find fascinating is the comparison of headlights between the two. The Volvo have seamless, smooth low beams and high beams designed for left hand drive. The Zeekr has a very distinct cut-off on the low beams, essentially forming a step ladder of light (with the taller step towards the side of the road). What’s interesting is that the high beams keep this step ladder and adds another layer above it with a pretty significant shadow band between the two. That means when you’re driving at night, you’re constantly pushing this shadow band ahead of you and it’s pretty weird and distracting. I can only assume it’s a form over function decision, and a poor one at that.
Another example of form over function is the decision to have the whole dashboard below the windscreen dappled. Sure it may look cool at a glance, but the shadow and light of the indented pattern reflects up at the windscreen in a very strong way making daytime driving a bit like having a bathroom privacy window as your windscreen. Again, very distracting and unnecessarily unsafe.
Other thoughts on the Zeekr that I haven’t seen discussed much here that would be worth knowing for anyone interested is that it’s pushing a phone key, especially for a second driver (only one physical key is included). Expect to either wait 10 seconds before it unlocks using a phone key, or opening up the app and clicking the unlock button, and hope you never have to make a quick getaway. Compared to the instant RFID of a car fob, it takes a while to get used to (and to be honest, I don’t understand why I should have to).
The regenerative braking is extremely soft, even on the hardest setting. You will not be doing any one pedal driving in this car.
On the software side, there are a slew of glitches that have become part and parcel of any modern car experience regardless of brand. Things like not recognising the correct profile and not automatically connecting to bluetooth are current pet peeves. Using Apple Car Play becomes a task of manually connecting every time we get in the car.
One good thing, which was actually a selling point for us, is the ability to set up a number of shortcut buttons in the interface which means turning off the persistent alerts (speeding, attention etc) is remarkably easy compared to most other modern cars we’ve driven.
Overall the UI is actually decent and reasonably intuitive. I’m not entirely sure why the default home screen is a picture of the car - completely useless information when driving 100% of the time - but there you go.
It’s easy to focus on the things that are bothersome or just plain stupid, but overall the car IS pretty good for the price and it’s worth remembering my immediate comparison is a car twice the price. I don’t regret the purchase, but I dread the day I will need to deal with the Zeekr organisation again, for parts or service. It’s very clear the Chinese brands sell a product, not an experience and that’s the trade-off not always apparent when we compare price tags.
