New Chinese car brands are arriving in the UK at an extraordinary rate – but what’s happening behind the scenes is even more surprising.

With new models from brands like Zeekr, Geely, Chery and Xpeng popping up on the forecourts of your local dealership, it’s easy to write them off as small companies we don’t know much about.

But a visit to Zeekr’s factory in Hangzhou Bay, China – a vast site capable of producing over 300,000 cars a year – soon puts the scale into perspective.

It may still be an unknown brand in the UK but Zeekr, which is set to launch here at the end of 2026, is part of the huge Chinese carmaker Geely Group. It already sells Geely cars in the UK, owns Polestar, Volvo and Lotus and manufactures the electric black cabs from LEVC we see around London. 

Zeekr is still a young company, launched in 2021, but it was conceived from the outset as a global brand, with European expansion built into its DNA. It has a design and engineering base in Gothenburg and its brand identity was shaped by the former Volvo design chief Peter Horbury, who was promoted to head up Geely Group design back in 2011.

My visit to see its operation in China gave me a glimpse into how rapidly Zeekr has grown in the past five years and how quickly car manufacturing is changing – with automation playing a bigger role than ever before.

In Hangzhou Bay, eastern China, Zeekr's '5G Intelligent Factory' covers 1.3 million square metres and produces over 300,000 cars a year, roughly the same as Nissan’s factory in Sunderland. Cars for Zeekr, along with Polestar 4s heading to UK buyers, roll off the production lines here.

The state of the art facility is a clean sheet EV factory built in just three years which opened in 2021. It covers an area roughly the size of 154 football pitches, with a workforce of just 1,700 people. In the welding facility alone, robots outnumber people at a ratio of 10 to 1, taking care of all of the practical work.

Compare this with Nissan’s Sunderland plant, which employs over 6,000 workers and still relies on a balance of people and machines, with around one robot for every 6–10 workers.

In Hangzhou Bay, robots dominate processes like welding, with humans largely focused on monitoring and maintenance roles, and it’s an impressive sight.

The body shells of the Zeekr 001 – the brand’s flagship model, which can outrun a Bugatti Veyron – glide along a conveyor belt on a gantry above my head, while robots work in synchronicity underneath, lifting parts into rigs and welding everything into place.

As the robotic ballet takes place in the centre of the vast facility – capable of operating 24 hours a day if production demands – I spot row upon row of parts stacked off to the sides. Body shells, bonnets and rear window frames are piled neatly to the roof of the welding shop, waiting to be collected by small autonomous robots that take them where they need to be.

In just 15 hours a car can be fully assembled here, and the Hangzhou Bay facility has the capacity to produce a car every minute – that’s robot efficiency for you.

I do occasionally spot a human, but there are only 100 of them working alongside 900 robots in the welding facility. It’s only when we reach the final stage of production in the assembly shop, which itself covers over 150,000 square metres, that human workers really make an appearance.

Over 800 employees work here, giving each car a final inspection: polishing, checking shut lines, monitoring the paint finish and overall quality inside and out.

As a Polestar 4 rolls off the final stage of the line, alongside a handsome Zeekr 001 and a large Zeekr 8X SUV (which should also be coming to the UK), it strikes me that even in a high-tech factory dominated by robots, the car still needs the human touch before it can be sent to the customer.

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The Zeekr 001 is a luxury electric shooting brake that's built at Zeekr's Hangzhou Bay intelligent factory