Lynk & Co Draws Attention After Cliff Crash Leaves Driver With Minor Injuries

The driver, identified in media interviews as Liu, was driving alone that morning to have the new car tinted. The vehicle was traveling at about 50 km/h and it was not fully light. According to the account, high beams from an oncoming vehicle affected his visibility and he was unfamiliar with the road. He mistook rocks on the roadside for normal road surface; after the car went onto the rocks, he lost control. The car left the road, became airborne, struck and rolled, and finally came to rest at the bottom of a cliff with a drop of nearly 100 meters. Grass and shrubs on the slope provided some cushioning, and the car did not fall vertically, but the new vehicle was severely damaged and was confirmed scrapped.

On Oct. 13, Lynk & Co released an accident statement. It said the occupant compartment remained intact, the A, B and C pillars did not deform, and the doors could still open normally. Airbags deployed in time during the rollover. The power battery did not smoke, catch fire, explode or leak electricity. The vehicle's emergency rescue system triggered automatically and initiated a voice call to the owner; staff then contacted the driver, helped call police and went to the hospital to accompany him. The driver's only injuries were abrasions and a minor thoracic vertebral fracture, and he was in good spirits. After the crash, Liu said he planned to buy the same model again.

The crash drew attention to a brand that has not been among the most prominent players in the current race for intelligent driving. Lynk & Co has acknowledged lagging in smart cockpit and assisted driving. In a September 2025 interview, Lin Jie, senior vice president of Geely Automobile Group and general manager of Lynk & Co Automobile Sales Company, said Lynk & Co had once led in the fuel-car era, but after the industry entered the new-energy era and new carmakers joined the competition, its intelligent features became a follower rather than a leader.

Founded in 2016 by Geely and Volvo, Lynk & Co entered the market with the CMA architecture developed by both companies. The Lynk 01 helped it gain a position with design and quality, and the Lynk 03 gave it a sporty performance label. But in the smart electric vehicle era, its early electronic architecture, developed in Europe and using a Linux infotainment system, lost competitiveness in China as domestic automakers rapidly iterated voice interaction and cockpit ecosystems. Lynk & Co later adjusted its R&D system and offered hardware upgrades for early owners' infotainment systems. In assisted driving, the company only began offering highway NOA on main models around 2024, while Huawei, XPeng and Li Auto had pushed competition toward city NOA and end-to-end large models.

Lynk & Co's need for technology, capital and R&D resources ultimately came from Geely. In 2024, Geely launched the Taizhou Declaration to integrate resources across its brands. In February 2025, Zeekr and Lynk & Co completed an equity transaction and Zeekr Technology Group was formally established. Zeekr had invested heavily in intelligent driving and electric powertrain technology, but its results mainly served its own models. After the integration, the two brands began sharing R&D results, expanding technology allocation and application scale. Lin Jie disclosed that the Qianli Haohan H7 and Nvidia Thor chip, originally planned to be launched first in Zeekr models, were after integration first installed in the Lynk 900.

In April 2025, the Lynk 900 went on sale with Qianli Haohan H5 and H7 solutions, with the highest version equipped with an Nvidia Thor chip offering up to 700 TOPS of computing power. In September of the same year, the Lynk 10 EM-P was launched with lidar as standard across the lineup, two assisted driving solutions, H5 and H7, support for city NOA and an upgraded LYNK Flyme Auto 2 cockpit. New Lynk 07 and 08 EM-P models and the electric Lynk 10 and 10+ followed, extending the intelligent technology system to more models.

While Lynk & Co worked to catch up in software, the crash highlighted the hardware engineering it had accumulated earlier. The original CMA architecture was jointly developed by Geely and Volvo, with body structure and crash safety as important design directions. The Lynk 10 EM-P involved in the accident uses the upgraded CMA Evo architecture, with high-strength steel and aluminum accounting for more than 80.5 percent. Its A-pillar uses 2,000 MPa ultra-high-strength steel, and the power battery is protected by structures including ten-cell anti-collision beams. Lynk & Co's safety technology, built over years, was displayed unusually directly in an accident.

As intelligent features become increasingly quantifiable through chip computing power, assisted driving takeover mileage and city NOA coverage, the crash served as a reminder that vehicle engineering and long-term technical accumulation still shape how consumers judge a car. A car is first a car, and only then does it need better intelligent capabilities.

Editor's Summary

A Lynk & Co 10 EM-P fell nearly 100 meters off a mountain road in Sichuan on Oct. 9, leaving its driver with only minor injuries. Lynk & Co said the cabin, airbags, battery and emergency rescue system performed as designed, drawing attention to safety at a time when the brand is trying to catch up in intelligent features under Geely's brand integration with Zeekr. The incident highlighted how basic vehicle engineering can matter even as the industry races on smart-driving metrics.