Zeekr’s new all-electric 7X SUV sets a bold benchmark for premium EVs in Australia, with world-first battery tech and a 13-minute fast charge.
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Luxury goes electric – at speed. Chinese-Swedish marque Zeekr has officially launched the 7X in Australia, positioning it as the country’s first mid-sized luxury electric SUV tailored for modern families. But this is no ordinary EV.
The Zeekr 7X arrives with the world-first Golden Battery – a breakthrough in ultra-fast charging technology that propels the vehicle from 10 to 80 per cent in just 13 minutes.
Unveiled today at the Australian Museum in Sydney, the Zeekr 7X represents a sophisticated fusion of Scandinavian design, next-gen digital integration and high-performance engineering.
With pricing starting at $57,900 (plus on-road costs), the model offers three variants: a single-motor Rear-Wheel Drive, Long-Range Rear-Wheel Drive, and the flagship dual-motor Performance All-Wheel Drive, which delivers a blistering 0–100km/h in 3.8 seconds.
Designed in Zeekr’s Gothenburg studio, alongside stablemates Volvo, Polestar and Lotus, the 7X is based on Geely’s SEA platform and features a minimalist exterior marked by sleek surfaces, sculpted lines and full-width LED lighting.
Inside, it’s a sanctuary of luxe detailing, advanced technology and serious space. Despite its mid-size status, it offers the roominess of a full-size SUV and 539L of rear boot space, with up to 62L front storage in RWD models.
Cabin luxuries include power-operated doors, ventilated massage seats and premium materials across all touchpoints—particularly on the Performance AWD variant.
As a software-defined vehicle, the 7X is built around digital smarts. It runs Qualcomm’s lightning-fast Snapdragon 8295 chip, making it the most powerful Zeekr yet. The 16-inch HD touchscreen infotainment system is matched by an optional 36.2-inch AR head-up display that overlays navigation and alerts into the driver’s field of view.
Safety technology is comprehensive, with 12 cameras and radar enabling features such as Adaptive Cruise Control, 3D surround-view monitoring, cross-traffic alerts and full automatic park assist.
Over-the-air software updates promise to keep the vehicle’s systems continuously evolving.
With up to 615km of range (WLTP), the Long-Range RWD model is ideal for extended family road trips, while the AWD Performance trim offers serious muscle with 475kW of power and 710Nm of torque. The active air suspension system with 45mm lift capacity ensures off-road capability to match the on-road presence.
Underpinning the Zeekr 7X’s headline charging time is an 800V electrical architecture, future-proofed to handle 450kW DC rates as infrastructure evolves. Even today, using a 360kW charger, drivers can add hundreds of kilometres of range in under a quarter of an hour.
Home charging is just as impressive. A standard 22kW onboard AC charger enables a full charge (10–100%) in 4.5 hours for the standard RWD model.
To celebrate the launch, Zeekr is offering exclusive bonuses to the first 1,000 Australian customers, including:
With more than 520,000 EVs sold globally since its debut in 2021, Zeekr is rapidly becoming a heavyweight in electric mobility. The 7X joins the local lineup ahead of the Zeekr X and Zeekr 009 later this year, signalling the brand’s serious ambitions for the Australian market.
“The Zeekr 7X delivers the kind of intelligent design, long-range confidence, and ultra-fast charging that Australian drivers are looking for,” said Frank Li, Vice President of Zeekr International and Managing Director of Zeekr Australia.
“It’s engineered for modern families but with the refinement and technology you’d expect from a premium EV.”
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
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OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
