A Automobile for Individuals Who Do not Care About Vehicles

The Lynk & Co 01 is tough to explain. Not as a result of it’s uncategorizable. It’s a compact crossover, and when you shut your eyes and sketch a up to date crossover, you’ll find yourself with something very much like the Lynk & Co 01: a barely bulbous physique, 4 doorways, a hatch, black plastic wheel arches over 20-inch wheels that by some means look undersized. A smattering of “cute” design thrives, like these reptilian receding headlamps perched atop the entrance fenders, a slim baleen grille, clear taillight lenses, and — on the one I drove — a drunkenly flattened rainbow of blue trim alongside the roof rails and round two of the wheels’ 5 fan-blade spokes. The Lynk & Co 01 is just not disagreeable trying. It’s merely anodyne to the purpose of innocuousness. You wouldn’t lose it in a car parking zone, however you would possibly merely overlook about it fully, and take an Uber residence.

That is, in some ways, the purpose of the Lynk & Co 01: an eminently usable and sensible car for individuals who don’t give a shit about vehicles.

This was clear to me even earlier than I spent per week with one. I drove it by cities, valleys, and an interconnected archipelago of islands, from the western coast of Sweden — the place the corporate is headquartered — to the Hvaler nationwide park in Norway. After I met with the CEO of Lynk & Co, Alain Visser, earlier than he handed me the important thing fob, he advised me the corporate’s merchandise are aimed on the roughly 15 to twenty % of European motorists who’re in no way all in favour of superfluities like efficiency, horsepower, and dealing with. They simply desire a car that may comfortably and safely get them from place to position.

As I prefer to say of many issues (together with my very own preeminence on the earth of automotive journalism), “When you set the bar low sufficient, you’ll at all times succeed.” The Lynk & Co 01 achieves this elemental mission, in no small half due to good bones — particularly, Volvo’s Compact Modular Structure, shared with the Volvo XC40, C40, and Polestar 2. The Lynk & Co variant makes use of an environment friendly 177-hp 1.5-liter fuel engine paired with an 80-hp electrical motor from the PHEV model of the XC40 bought in Europe and China.

This setup allowed me, my three companions, and all our bodily and emotional baggage, to journey round-trip from Gothenburg, Sweden to Skjærhalden, Norway, about 325 miles, on a single tank of fuel.

It additionally gave me the chance to check out the charging infrastructure in Norway, the nation with the world’s highest proportion of latest plug-in electrical car gross sales (it just lately topped 90 % of all new-car gross sales). Partly as penance for being among the many world’s largest producers and exporters of oil and pure fuel, the Scandinavian nation closely incentivizes EV gross sales and assist, so even in a tiny fishing village hours from any inhabitants middle, I discovered a row of 16 EV chargers behind the city corridor. And after some irritating failures with my ChargePoint RFID card, some adventures with Google Translate, the help of a taciturn native, and a few winging it whereas filling in a sign-up web page in Norwegian on my telephone, I managed to get the 01 charging. I’m really a citizen of the world.

Except for making an honest, comfy, secure car, Lynk & Co’s massive concept is that users won’t really buy the 01 — they’ll subscribe to it for an all-inclusive price of 550 Euro per 30 days (protecting the automotive fee, insurance coverage, and upkeep), with none long-term dedication. If a buyer retains the automotive for a yr, the corporate swaps it for a brand-new one. If a subscriber opts out after one month, they simply flip the automotive in, and that’s it.

At any time in the course of the month-by-month lease, the subscriber can lease out the automotive to debtors by way of the Lynk & Co app, setting their very own hourly, every day, weekly or month-to-month price. Type of like an AirBnB for vehicles, if each AirBnB was an inside courtyard room on the Radisson.

Although the 01 I borrowed spent a couple of days stashed in a car parking zone whereas my group adventured to a distant Norwegian island reachable solely by ferry boat, I didn’t experiment with renting out the automotive, although it was tempting and easy. You simply hit a button that claims “Share My Automobile” on the infotainment display screen — a pleasant panorama structure with built-in CarPlay, not like the vertical, CarPlay-less iterations in Volvo and Polestar fashions — and put together to discipline inquiries from different people who don’t care about cars.

Based mostly on Share My Automobile’s map view, there are many folks like that in Norway. Lynk & Co believes this cohort is rising worldwide. My guess is, the corporate’s not flawed.