ZEEKR is officially better than Rolls-Royce

I'm told that if you're being copied by a Chinese company, you should see it as an honor. It's something they only do when the idea they're copying is so good it's worth it. If that is really the case (if there are any Chinese readers out there, please tell me), than I do wonder why it has taken Zeekr this long to add a starry headliner, the thing that has up until now has been a feature of Rolls-Royces, to their 001.

No, I know the 001 doesn't have the starry headliner. It's being added as an option in the new model that, according to CarNewsChina, will be introduced in the Chinese market on October the 11th. And even though the 001 still won't look better than the Rolls-Royce Spectre, it's out Rolls-Roycing Rolls-Royce on almost every level.

Next to the stars in the headliner, the 001 will be able to charge at insane speeds thanks to the new 900V architecture, which it claims is a 'massive improvement' over the 800V architecture the current model already has. It still isn't a match for the 927V architecture Lucid has in both the Air and the Gravity, but they don't have stars in the headliner, so they don't count.

That new architecture gives the 001 the capability to charge from 10 to 80 percent, (coming down to about 60 kWh) in 7 minutes, or at an average speed of 685 kW. I don't know of any fast charger that can handle those speeds in the EU, and I'm guessing that if they are already here, they're probably broken or working at half capacity.

If you think that 685 kW is fast, Zeekr goes even further with a claim that the 95 kWh-model is capable of 12c charging, which means the thing will be able to charge or discharge completely in 5 minutes. You can do the math on this one yourself, I'm to scared of those numbers.

And while all that technical stuff is cool and all, Zeekr has to copy one more thing to really out class Rolls-Royce: building every car with extremely skillful craftsman that take pride in every part they stitch together, or every button they polish to perfection. However, something is telling me that just doesn't line up with the way Chinese see the honor in copying...

In other news:

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You knew the day would come that AI would be designing a hypercar that people will be making. Does that make it the first step into the future with our Terminator overlords telling us what to do? I don't know. What I do know is that, as you'd expect, the AI hypercar is the blandest version of all the cool cars that came before it. At least it has an Italian V12, but you could argue if that is a good or a bad thing...

There has been a lot of talk about the safety of door handles lately. Apparently nobody could've seen the dangers of handles that disappear into the doors themselves when you're in the car, even though every journalist I know has asked car makers about how to open doors with these handles after a crash. And goes only for the handles on the outside of the car. The stylish handles on the inside, that ar