Car for geeks does the world's fastest EV drift

David Linklater
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Photos / Supplied

Photos / Supplied

A battery electric vehicle (BEV) you’ve probably never heard of now holds two Guinness World Records: Fastest Drift by an Electric Car and Fastest Electric Car Slalom.

Zeekr is a relatively young EV brand from China; it only delivered its first vehicles to domestic customers last year. However, it’s part of something very big indeed: it’s a subsidiary of Geely Group, in the same family as Volvo, Polestar and Lotus.

It was created as an upmarket brand to rival Tesla and Nio in China, although it also plans to launch in Europe next year. Its first model is the 001; makes sense. The Zeekr name, by the way, is a combination of “Generation Z” and “geek”.

The Fastest Drift by an Electric Car requires the vehicle to achieve a sustained drift (the time has not been specified by Guinness) greater than 160km/h; the Zeekr 001 recorded 207.966km/h, driven by Zheo Junfeng. The drift angle ranged from 31.3 to 35.9 degrees.

To set the Fastest Electric Car Slalom record, the 001 weaved through 50 equally spaced cones, without knocking any down, in 49.05 seconds.

Both records were supervised by a Guinness adjudicator at the Catarc Proving Ground in China.

Zeekr says the 001 has been developed around the ethos “don’t be a boring electric car”. Other projects include a pure-electric vehicle collaboration with Waymo in the US for its autonomous ride-hailing fleet, and a new purpose-built commercial mobility vehicle being developed in Sweden.

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