Stupidity reigns: 2025 Zeekr X has swallowed a cat, a horse and a bicycle

Something very frightening is happening with new cars; they seem to have lost their little electronic minds, and the plot, and I’m not sure whose fault it is, but as I’m now of a certain age it’s tempting to just lean into blaming the Chinese.

This week I am driving an EV – the Zeekr X –  that, among its many pointless and inexplicable features, has buttons on its enormous touch screen that allow you to frighten strangers by pretending that you have a cat, a horse and a cyclist trapped under your bonnet, or perhaps being dragged under the vehicle.

And at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, car companies flocked to show off more silly and borderline dangerous frippery – including “full-windshield holographic displays” – that will be dripping into new vehicles everywhere in the near future.

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Sometimes I like to put myself inside the mind of a car company executive, although I find this difficult because that self-satisfied sense of financial security and having minions to shout at and bring me coffee is hard for me to engender.

Times must be tough, however, when they look into their seven-year model cycle crystal balls – go back in your own mind seven years and try to imagine the fast-moving hybrid/BEV/combustion model mix today – and try to work out how they’re going to sell cars to a generation of humans who can’t concentrate on anything for more than eight seconds at a time and find driving about as exciting and desirable as using a phone to actually speak to someone.

I’ve seen this myself as my teenage son is the only one in his friend group of half a dozen men living in Australia’s only proper city who has his licence. Not only are the other young men not trying to get their P plates, they have absolutely no interest in doing so, nor in cars.

Compared to the world I grew up in, where you went for your test the day you turned 17 and put all of your financial efforts into acquiring something with an engine and wheels, and where posters with pictures of cars on them were widely common in boys’ bedrooms, this is an unimaginable change. And if I was a car exec, I imagine it would make my blood run cold.

I’m not sure that the answer I would have come up with is “let’s fill all new vehicles with stupid gimmicks that appeal to children who are too young to drive”, but that’s the approach that’s increasingly becoming evident, first in Teslas, which allow you to play video games on the screen like a child, or show a fireplace for no apparent reason, and now, increasingly in Chinese cars.

The Zeekr X AWD (from $64,900 plus ORCs) I’ve been driving has constantly distracted me from that task with its weird features and functions.

I sit stunned as I try to work out why it allows me to activate external speakers, which only work when the car is in Park, that will then make announcements to pedestrians, thanking them for getting out of my way, or project whatever music I’m playing to passers by (Gimme Head by The Radiators has been amusing, as has Cee Lo Green’s Fuck You), or better yet allow me to shout whatever I like at people.

Those options are weird, but almost amusing, while the function that makes it sound like there’s a cat screaming to get out of the Zeekr is just bizarre, and seems to upset animal lovers. You can also choose to make the car whinny like a horse, thump and whine like a tractor (again, why?), rev its imaginary engine like a sports car or even make the sound of a bicycle’s ringing bell. 

I don’t want to call all this stupid, but I’m going to. It’s stupid.

Even my 13-year-old daughter, who seems to sit at the centre of the demographic this silly stuff is aimed at, was only mildly amused when she played with it, before becoming mortified when I took over and started making howling wolf noises. I bet she would have liked the selfie camera the car also offers, but I didn’t want to show her that final proof that this car is not entirely aiming at sensible adults who can actually afford one.

I am guessing that in other countries you can use these external speaker cat calls and horsing around functionalities while you’re driving, and that might make them more practical (or at least the one pre-recorded voice that says something like “Thanks for letting me in”), but in safety-first Australia you can’t play with them unless you’re stopped, rendering them even more dumb.

And this is merely the dim end of the wedge so far, because this year’s CES offerings show that there is more of this kind of teen bait on the way as car companies gamble that we’re fast approaching a future where cars drive themselves and thus become entertainment hubs, or very, very large iPads on wheels. (Toyota and chip champion Nvidia, which basically rules the world of AI tech, announced a partnership at CES to develop autonomous-driving platforms, which means that’s going to happen fast.)

Hyundai Mobis apparently “stole the show” with its Windshield Holographic Display, which uses three projectors inside the car to turn the windshield into a transparent screen, projecting navigation, driving data, and “media” (hopefully a video of a trapped kitten) directly onto the glass without physical displays.

There is no clearer indication of which way the wind is blowing and which demographic the car world is going for than the Afeela 1 unveiled at CES. A joint project between Honda and a brand my son is intimately acquainted with, and possibly in love with, Sony, it’s a luxury electric hatch “designed as much for entertainment and gaming as driving performance”. And doesn’t that sentence sum up the future?

Aside from semi-autonomous driving tech – pretty vital if you’re going to be gaming in it – the big selling point is that you’ll be able to enjoy Playstation games on the main infotainment display. That being the case, my son, and his mates, might not just buy an Afeela 1, they might live in one.

Not just a crazy concept, the Afeela 1 will arrive in left-hand-drive markets in mid-2026 before expanding to right-hand-drive countries later that year. It features dual motors making a combined 360kW and a claimed 483km of range. No word yet on whether it allows you to live out your Grand Theft Auto dreams in real life.