I could not help but giggle when I saw the press release photo of Spiros Fotinos, Zeekr Europe CEO. There is a brattish challenging attitude that is impossible to overlook. An endearing Mediterranean swag that fits perfectly with the drive needed to steer a disruptive Chinese automotive brand in the competitive and slightly insane European market.
Fotinos leads an organization based in Gothenburg, Sweden, that has a workforce from 31 different nationalities. He himself is a Greek-Canadian who has worked in North America, Europe and Asia. After 25 years at Toyota and Lexus, he joined Zeekr Europe about a year ago, in September 2022.
His provocative stance in the photo is not there by chance: he knows what needs to be done to establish a new luxury brand in demanding market conditions.
During a brief visit at Zeekr’s European headquarters I had the opportunity to talk with him about a variety of subjects.
It seems fitting that we start with the name. What does ZEEKR mean, after all?
“The name is made of two Chinese characters, Zi and Kurt. In Chinese means kind of a techie geek. Not the guy who plays video games all day long in the basement, but that one friend you have that always knows which is the coolest phone or which is the next trend. That is the kind of core significance of it. And when they were spelling it out in English, they adopted the KR, because KR is the abbreviation for the element 36 of the periodic table, which is Krypton. Krypton is a passive element, but once give it a bit of energy, it changes color, it comes to life. And I think that’s the significance of electrification. That’s why you’ll see we use Krypton from time to time in marketing elements.”

Pre-orders for the flagship Zeekr 001 and the urban SUV, the X, opened in late June, in Sweden and the Netherlands. If all goes according to the plan, deliveries start this Autumn. Fotinos shared his expansion plan for other European countries, with a goal of 18 countries until 2026:
“The first two countries were logical decisions. Here [Sweden] we have a quite substantial footprint from a design and R&D perspective. We employ roughly 1200 people Zeekr dedicated. Our holding and the business operation will be run out of Amsterdam. We are building the headquarter now and it should be ready around November. It would be odd if we were not selling cars in our two home markets.
After Sweden, we will expand this cluster to Norway and Denmark. It makes sense in terms of logistics and parts supply. Then we add primary hubs for the next two clusters, France and Germany, a goal for next year. France opens up for Belgium. As the next step we would be looking more south because we have Italy, Spain, Portugal, before we start looking more at east.”
As Zeekr is not looking for local distribution deals and has a direct to consumed approach, we wanted to know the modus operandi for each market:
“Typically we would go into a market and establish a flagship store in one of the main cities, alongside a flagship service center. These two provide the baseline of the experience. But we will offer mobile service, which means we come to you and we do the maintenance on site. We think we can cover probably close to 80% of the maintenance requirements on site. Beyond that, we would have a selected network of partners to to expand the service network.”
In China, Zeekr has built a charging network with proprietary hardware and software, but Fotinos is very clear about the prospect of building a similar ecosystem in Europe:
“We we don’t have a plan to start building our own supercharger network. If you look at the infrastructure footprint in Europe today, roughly 80, 85% of the infrastructure is home charging. Of what is left, 9% is public slow charging (AC). And the remainder are the DC fast and ultra fast chargers and it is not going to grow much.
Fast charging networks are heavy capital intensive investments. You need the real estate and the hardware as well. Even a 50 kW fast charger, a quality one, is probably costing you €20,000 to €25,000. If you go to 150 or 300 kW, we are talking about a lot of money. So unless you broaden the amount of cars that are coming through, it would be like having a gas station that only serves one brand.
The majority of the European charging will happen either at home, at the office, maybe at a supermarket or a shopping center. And the bulk of that, roughly the 95%, will not be fast charging. It will be AC, maybe 22 kW. So I think regarding the fast charger networks, it is going to be a race to get those strategic points on the highways and the oil companies will probably assume that role. They already have the space and the locations.
Our priority will focus more on the home ecosystem rather than rushing out to build our own fast Charger network for Zeekr cars. When you look at the ROI on Fast Charger networks, the margins in terms of the capital investment, unless you have the throughput, it is hard to do the math.”

Zeekr is a new company, but it has an already extensive experience regarding autonomous driving, particularly through the collaboration with Waymco, as Zeekr is building their Robotaxis. This was a great opportunity to have Fotinos’ view on this challenge:
“When you ask five people about autonomous driving, you get five different answers… At the top you have the Level 4 AD Robotaxi like we have with Waymo. Where we are pushing the boundaries of the technology. On the other side you have L2/L2+, which still implies hands on the steering wheel. That is what we already have for the consumer. It means providing the advanced convenience or safety features. But still the driver is primarily in control.
In between this and L4 there is a bit of a grey zone. Because if you look at L3 in terms of hardware requirements, then you go from a radar camera system to adding LIDAR. That is not very difficult. We have that capability already, but somebody has to pay. And if the use case is from this point in the highway to this one, at 60 or 80 km/h, maybe the consumer feels it is not there yet. I think we will see this capability toward L3 progressing as time goes by, as there are more use cases. But this progress is not only the responsibility of the OEM. We, of course, have to show that we have the capability. But the governments themselves have to produce policies and regulation. So far, only Germany and France have opened up a little bit toward L3, as we have the liability issue. And the customer also has a role to play. That you trust your vehicle enough to say, I’ll just sit back and relax while the car drives me along.
These three things need to move almost together for it to make sense because, again, someone has to pay for the incremental cost of that capability.
Regarding the way the Geely Group choses do organize its different brands, which a great amount of independency, Fotinos presents us with an overview of the strategy:
In the case of Geely, the brands are managed horizontally. You have Volvo, a historic brand with a long legacy, with a focus on safety. It is a public company. Separate strategy listed has its shareholders and it has to make its own choices about its product portfolio and direction.
Then you have Polestar, much more design oriented and younger aiming. And it is also a publicly listed company. The Polestar investors have expectations for that company to grow and evolve, which means Polestar choices are independent of what Volvo may choose to do.
Then you have Link & Co, which is primarily focused on the ownership experience, the sharing of mobility and less so on the product, if I dare say. The product is very strong and in fact it was designed here next door, both platform and top hat.
Then you have Lotus, which is Lotus, needless to say, and then you have Zeekr. So Zeekr is born from a blank sheet of paper. As a pure EV brand focused on advanced or intelligent electrified mobility, which means that the positioning is a little bit more tech oriented. I’ll give you two small examples of how that positioning really is separated, if we can use that word. The first is that if you look at the most advanced product we have in the group in terms of autonomous mobility, it’s the partnership with Waymo, the L4 Robotaxi. It’s a Zeekr product.
The other is that the software stack we use is not a Google software stack. It’s 100% Zeekr, because we decided to invest in software capability, just like, for example, Tesla. It is 100% in-house, which means we fully control our own ecosystem.
So from a positioning perspective, the brands each have its own path. We’re still pre-IPO, but we have investors and we have shareholders. Moving forward as a listed company, we have our own path.
So Geely provides the technologies within the group’s platform. The brands use that technology according to how they want their portfolio to develop, with an independent point of view. There is no hierarchy between the brands.
Of course, we’re not going to allow the brands to fall over and copy each other. But if you look at our collective market share in Europe, Volvo plus Polestar and us, still with zero deliveries, there is lots of room for our brands to grow and coexist in the marketplace.”
The energy transition in the automotive industry has put great pressure in established OEMs, but also created huge opportunities for other companies, including of course Chinese companies, most of them with no market share outside their home market. But Fotinos’ take has a wider view on this matter:
The transition to full electric is an opportunity for everybody, not just the Chinese. At Zeekr, our mission is to accelerate the shift to sustainable mobility. For me it is not about taking a customer from another EV brand. Of course I’m happy to do it. But if we do that, we didn’t accelerate anything. It’s kind of the same people around. And now if we want to accelerate, we need to get the premium diesel driver. That’s the target.
Zeekr took the bold decision of developing its own software infotainment, a different path from Volvo and Polestar, that uses Google software. Spiros Fotinos was eager to clarify why:
“Ours is for sure more advanced! Remember that we’re also coding on the Snapdragon 8155 [Qualcomm 8155 Snapdragon is a state of the art smart cockpit computing platform microchip], whose potential we haven’t stretched yet. The 8155 allows us to continue to bring new services, new apps, new features in the future.
The other thing is that, unlike what others might be doing, we’re not taking the Chinese multimedia and translate it to English. We have a full team here within our R&D and design teams that do UX and UI, which means that we look at it from a European consumer perspective, how do they interact with multimedia, which features do they prefer most? What kind of usage do they do with the multimedia so that we can customize from a European perspective what that interaction should be? This is an ongoing process as we learn from our users [feedback] and make improvements through an OTA update.”
I took the opportunity to ask Fotinos about one of the main big challenges that we face regarding the energy transition and that is the unavailability of affordable electric vehicles, in the price bracket between €20.000 to €25.000. His answer was quite surprising:
“That’s not our space necessarily. We are a premium brand and we intend to stay there. But that is an important topic and my opinion is that we need to reframe what the urban vehicle is for Europe. If you take an A and B segment entry vehicle, most of these cars are aiming at five star euro NCAP. There is an incremental cost to keep up with these demands, as well as drivers’ assistance systems and infotainment.
We need to look at this from scratch, to ensure an affordability. So when we add electrification, the A and B segment does not jump to C-segment prices. That is what is happening now because you want to add on the cost of electrification on a car whose costs have just gone up in the last decade.
Regarding the components needed for production, we wanted to know what has been Zeekr’s strategy regarding batteries.
“The two cars that are coming to Europe [the 001 and the X] both have CATL batteries, a close partner and investor. We have a very strong relationship. In fact, as you may have read, we were the first to access the Qilin battery, which allows for a one thousand kilometer version of the 001 in China. It has 140 kilowatt in the same footprint, meaning we didn’t change the wheelbase to fit that battery.
We have our own in-house company that supplies batteries in China. We sell the 001 with a smaller capacity battery, about 76 kW, which we will not bring to Europe. But we also have stationary storage for home or for industrial. We also build our own fast chargers.”
Four year ago Zeekr did not exist and most people still don’t know what the brand stands for. Of course, that might change soon, but we want to know how does Fotinos summons the passion and the will to fulfil this mission with Zeekr Europe, at the same time conveying this drive to a talented multinational team.
“I think it’s a combination of a few things. One is that, if you look at the leadership team, we are all European. And my leadership team has extensive experience in our industry. We know the European business, we know what leasing is. We know what residual values are. We know understand how the used car market works. We know the European consumer. And you have to understand the essence of the European market to succeed in this crazy continent. This is point number one.
The second is that being single minded is a huge advantage on its own when you look at that logo. That logo is pure electric. I don’t have to wear a hat today that says I’m electric, I’m a diesel, I’m electric, I’m a diesel, with the same people and trying to convince them [that] the sky is blue. No, the sky is blue some days.
That focus means that when you look at anything that you do, you don’t have to say, yes, but you know, we can’t say that because then we have these other products over here, so we can’t bash our own products.
So when you eliminate all of that and take a blank sheet of paper and say, what’s the mission? Very simple. Get the premium diesel driver to switch to electric. That is the mission. Focus is a very powerful thing and being single minded is a very powerful thing.
And the other point is speed. We don’t have complicated decision making. We don’t have councils and endless discussions and back and forth. And that’s not how we work. We can take decisions very, very quickly. In fact, some weeks ago I called Stefan Kozlov [Head of Design], and I said: “what if we did this, this and this?” And he said: “Let me look at it.” He calls me back a few days later, saying he has found something. We looped in R&D. Three days later he calls me, [to] come over to the studio and we’ve got it in VR [Virtual Reality]. We immediately we call the chief engineer of the vehicle in China. Okay. “Yeah, we can do this.” He calls the supplier, [who confirms] we can do this. So in two weeks, from an idea to production.
And this could be Changing a button, changing a virtual button on the screen. It could be adding a service. It could be anything. When you realize the potential of this, it becomes like a drug because you realize that there is nothing holding you back.”
