Car-makers branded hypocrites on sustainability

A car-sharing brand boss has called out rival car-makers as hypocrites on sustainability.

At the launch of Lynk & Co’s Milan club recently, CEO Alain Vissier slammed car companies for cynically using ‘sustainability’ as a buzzword while their products operate for only five per cent of the time.

Established by Chinese automotive powerhouse Geely, which also owns Volvo and Polestar, Lynk & Co is a subscription-focussed auto brand that plans to launch in Australia by 2025.

“Sustainability is a buzz word. No car company is sustainable. The cars they make could make a difference to the environment, yes, but they do nothing more than 95 per cent of the time and that’s not right,” Vissier said.

“Environmentally, they’re hypocrites.

“New cars are cleaner on the road than older cars, but they have high amounts of CO2 from production.

“The only way to equalize that CO2 is to drive them more so the on-road advantages come in to play, but that isn’t happening. That only happens when you share the cars with more than one user.”

Under Vissier’s leadership, Lynk & Co has gone all-in on a subscription-based, car-sharing business model, with the plug-in hybrid 01 crossover available for a €550 ($A858) monthly fee, including insurance, servicing and all expenses other than road tolls and fuel.

So far it has accumulated 27,000 users in Europe, based around the idea that customers can subscribe to a Lynk & Co 01 for one month at a time.

Even then, Lynk & Co drivers can re-share their cars to other subscription club members, relying on an Airbnb-style rating system, to the point where it claims some drivers do it so often they end up having their time with the car for free.

“Our plan was assuming that the car would change the ‘owner’ two times a year. But we see that the average subscription keeps it for 12 months.

“The order intake is going up because right now people are postponing buying a new car.”

But the Lynk & Co business model has had a tough run of it, particularly in its home market of China, where the customers rejected the subscription model entirely.

“In China it’s a very different business model,” Vissier admitted.

“I almost decoupled from that side of the business. The Chinese customers felt insulted by our business model.

“They prefer to buy the cars outright, and you can do that here [in Europe] too, but we decided some years ago that we should change that business model in China.”

Volvo was the first serious car-maker to try a subscription model in Europe, but abandoned it after less than a year due to lack of interest and perceived high pricing.

“Our reason of being is to not be a car brand but mobility brand, but Volvo is a car brand,” Vissier explained.

“For them to be outside of what they have been for 100 years is difficult, but that’s not us.”

Vissier also poured cold water on other car-makers’ subscription pushes, insisting they weren’t what they claimed to be.

“Nobody is following us. Everybody now talks subscription but it’s marketing blah-blah, because it’s short-term leasing, not subscription,” he insisted.

“People think they’ll win when they buy a car. You won’t win buying a car. You do this once every three or four years and you’re dealing with someone who does it twice a day.

“With us, you go online and you get them in black or blue and there are no options, and no dealer to talk to and it’s simple.”

Lynk & Co insists the only way to sustainability is car-sharing – even more than subscriptions.

“Am I saying we are the most sustainable car company? No, I’m not,” Vissier admitted.

“That would be an exaggeration, but we do have that ambition.

“The car industry today is unsustainable so we try to change that, and if a company doesn’t have a sustainability strategy, it doesn’t deserve to have either customers or employees.”

But other car-makers have tried the car-sharing business model and it hasn’t worked, with Mercedes-Benz and BMW both offloading their car-sharing businesses after more than a decade of effort.

“We have tried this and looked at it and experimented with different ways to engage customers, and it doesn’t really help, environmentally,” one rival insisted.

“How long do they keep the cars on the fleet for, before they sell them off? Two years? They are not getting a big benefit in the two years, and then the car becomes one of the other cars they’re complaining about.”

The obvious weak point in the Lynk & Co sustainability argument is that its only model is a plug-in hybrid and not an electric car. Its second will also be a PHEV – the Lynk & Co 09 large SUV, which is likely to spearhead the brand’s local launch.

Lynk & Co’s first EV is still another two years away, but Vissier insists that PHEV is right for the job it needs to do.

“For the foreseeable short-term future, it is PHEV and it is a perfect solution.

“This is a total mobility solution and the EV is a perfect second car.”

The irony of that is that Geely’s giant-killing Zeekr EV brand started with a car that was a Lynk & Co cast-off, because Vissier didn’t want it in his brand.

“That’s true. The Zeekr 001 was the car we did not want,” he admitted.

“After we launched the brand in 2016, some of the criticism was why such a big car as an urban brand?

“To come in with the 001 as a five-metre sedan would have been totally against what our customers were telling us. I don’t think that car fits our brand.

“Then Geely took the decision to launch Zeekr as a premium brand.”

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