Lynk & Co Car-Sharing Advocate Slams Auto Brands As Sustainability “Hypocrites”

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 sat still for more than 95 percent of the time.

“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% 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 equalizer 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 monthly fee, including insurance, servicing and all expenses other than road tolls and fuel.

It has opened Lynk & Co clubs in major cities across Europe, which members can use as cafes, remote working sites, event venues or simply a low-pressure car showroom for the brand.

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 (Europe), too, but we decided some years ago that we should change that business model in China.”

Volvo was the first serious carmaker 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 bla bla, 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.”

Owned by Chinese powerhouse Geely, 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 if a company doesn’t have a sustainability strategy, it doesn’t deserve to have either customers or employees.”

But other carmakers 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 of financially,” 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.

“When we started we were going to have one car,” Vissier explained.

“Only having an EV was not a solution because of the charging infrastructure.

“I hope the governments wake up and do something about the charging infrastructure because it’s already a massive problem.

“I find it quite shocking that nothing is happening.”

Lynk & Co’s first EV is still another two years away, but Vissier insists the PHEV is perfect 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.”