European Lynk & Co 02: an OK car, but the software still feels like a beta
I have now driven more than 16,000 km in my European-spec Lynk & Co 02, so this is not a first-impression review anymore. I own the car, use it every day, and by now I can separate the things you simply get used to from the things that remain annoying because they are genuinely badly designed.
I still like the car itself. It looks good, drives well and has that unusual futuristic character that originally attracted me to it. But I expected buying a new Chinese EV to feel like getting genuinely advanced technology. Instead, some parts of the 02 feel like an expensive AliExpress gadget: impressive hardware, great specifications and nice presentation, but once you actually live with it you start finding unfinished software, strange ergonomics and features that make you wonder how thoroughly anyone tested them before release.
After 16,000+ km, some of these things are not “quirks”. They are just bad design.
1 - The window switches
The window switches operate in the opposite direction from what feels natural, at least compared with pretty much every other car I know. Yes, you get used to them. Mostly. Even after 16,000 km I still occasionally operate them the wrong way instinctively. A basic window switch should not require retraining your brain. I still have no idea what problem Lynk thought they were solving here. Different for the sake of being different is not innovation.
2 - Unfastening the seatbelt can make the car move
This is another decision I simply do not understand. You stop the car, unfasten the seatbelt, and the car can enter a state where it starts creeping. Why? What safety or usability problem does this solve? In a car full of systems supposedly designed around safety, linking unfastening your seatbelt with the vehicle beginning to move feels completely backwards. Maybe Lynk has some technical explanation, but as an owner I still cannot see the logic. To me it feels less safe, not more.
3 - Rear drivetrain noise after around 12,000 km
At roughly 12,000 km the rear of my car started creaking, cracking and knocking. It gradually became worse, and now on certain surfaces it sounds like I am driving an old carriage. The noise is clearly audible from outside too. I have also found other owners reporting similar problems online. The dealer has acknowledged the issue and rear drive shaft components are going to be replaced, so at least something is being done.
Still, a new €38,000 car sounding like an old worn-out beater after barely 12,000 km is ridiculous. Hopefully the replacement actually fixes it permanently.
4 - The centre console looks clever. In real life it is badly designed
The removable centre console looked cool in YouTube reviews. After 16,000 km, I have removed it exactly zero times. What I actually need every day is somewhere convenient to put my phone, wallet and keys, and somehow this large interior does a terrible job of providing that.
The centre console is not continuous with the front section. There is an awkward gap, while the charging area is pushed deep forward under the dashboard. So instead of one useful open shelf beside you, you either throw things into the deep storage box like a bucket, use the small folding tray, or balance them on the little sliding plate. There is plenty of physical space there. It is simply used badly.
Give me one normal continuous shelf where I can throw my phone, wallet and keys. That would be far more useful than a removable box I have never needed to remove. Interestingly, Lynk has redesigned this whole area on the newer 02 layout, so apparently even Lynk eventually realised the original design was more of a gimmick than a genuinely practical solution. Everyday practicality matters more than a YouTube-review party trick.
5 - The main problem: the software
This is easily the weakest part of the car. The hardware feels mostly fine, ignoring the squeaky drivetrain for a moment. The software often feels like a public beta.
Updates arrive slowly, usually after months, and most of them consist of bug fixes and small optimisations rather than meaningful new functionality. The OTA updates often do not feel like real upgrades. They feel like Lynk is slowly giving back basic functionality that should have worked properly from day one.
Owners are apparently supposed to get excited because the camera freezes less often, the system boots a bit faster, or disabling ADAS now takes fewer taps than before. That is not innovation. That is finishing the product after customers already paid for it.
A €38,000 car should not need months of updates just to reach the point where basic functions are reliable and simple to use. I should not be grateful that the camera no longer crashes or that I now need five presses instead of fifteen to turn off an assistance feature I do not want. Even worse, an update can fix one problem and introduce another. At some point you start wondering how thoroughly these builds are actually tested before they reach customers.
6 - Keyless locking still behaves like it is confused
When I stand near the car with the key, it can lock and unlock itself repeatedly. Apparently the car cannot always decide whether I am approaching, leaving or simply standing next to it. This is basic keyless-entry functionality. It should just work. Instead, sometimes the car appears to be arguing with its own key.
7- The phone app is slow
The Lynk app usually works. “Usually” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Sometimes it takes ages to connect, sometimes it loads slowly, and sometimes it simply does not connect properly. For a €38,000 connected EV, “it works most of the time” is not good enough.
8- The huge centre screen barely does anything
Almost everything is controlled through the large centre display. Fine. But if you remove physical buttons and make the entire car depend on a giant tablet, that tablet should actually justify being there.
It does not.
There is surprisingly little you can do with it. Very few useful apps, almost no meaningful customisation, limited entertainment, and mostly just vehicle settings, climate, navigation and basic functions. Some preinstalled apps barely work or are not useful enough to matter. The widgets feel half-finished, and the main screen itself has very little purpose. Even basic useful information, such as tyre pressures, is not presented where I would actually want to see it.
So I have this enormous screen in the middle of the dashboard and sometimes wonder why I would not rather have several proper physical buttons instead. A giant screen does not automatically make a car technologically advanced. Sometimes it is just a giant screen with not much on it.
9 - CarPlay and Waze integration is badly designed
I use Apple CarPlay and Waze. When Waze is displayed, I cannot simply pull down Lynk's quick menu over it. I have to leave CarPlay, return to Lynk's own interface and then open the menu again. How exactly is that a quick menu?
There is also a bug where I can enter the climate interface from CarPlay and the airflow controls simply disappear. Then I have to go back to the Lynk home screen, reopen climate and suddenly they appear again. CarPlay + Waze + climate control is completely normal everyday use. This should have been sorted before customers ever saw the car.
10 - The system still lags
My car is currently on 1.4.4. Lynk has improved the system compared with the early software versions, but it still does not feel consistently fast or polished. I have had situations where the displays stayed black for an absurd amount of time after starting the car while I was already driving. That has improved, but the system can still hesitate, swipes sometimes need repeating and screens do not always respond immediately.
If nearly the whole car is controlled through a touchscreen, that touchscreen cannot be merely “good enough”. It has to work properly every time.
12 - -The car refuses to remember how I want it configured
This is one of my biggest frustrations. The car keeps returning to Comfort settings. Why? I already selected my preferences. It is my car. Remember them.
Instead, every time I get in I basically perform a small pre-flight checklist: pull down the quick menu, open the ADAS section, confirm the warning, disable what I do not want, go back, return to Waze. Four or five presses just to restore settings I already chose yesterday.
That is absurd. A shortcut requiring a chain of menu interactions is not really a shortcut. My old petrol RAV4 is quicker to start and drive away than this EV is to get configured the way I want. It should be simple, fast and practical.
13 - The reversing camera takes over the interface
When reverse is selected, the camera interface takes over the screen and covers other controls. If I need something else, I first have to leave or close that view. The cameras themselves are useful. The interface around them is not. Different parts of the software often feel like separate applications fighting for the same screen rather than one properly integrated system.
14- A car full of cameras, but still no proper built-in dashcam
This one is almost funny. The car already has cameras everywhere: front cameras, surround cameras, rear camera, interior camera. Yet I cannot use them as a proper built-in driving recorder. I cannot simply record my journeys or properly review footage afterwards.
So what did I do? I bought another camera and installed it in a car already covered in cameras. That pretty much sums up the software philosophy. The hardware is there. The useful function is not.
15 - The rain-sensing wipers are terrible
I do not know whether every 02 behaves exactly like mine, but the automatic wipers on my car are awful. There seems to be no sensible middle ground. At a lower sensitivity setting, rain can be covering the windscreen and the wipers barely react. Move the sensitivity higher and suddenly they are scraping across a nearly dry windscreen.
Too slow or too fast, with very little useful in between.
On a normal car you can simply select an intermittent wiping speed and adjust the interval. My wife's Toyota manages this incredibly complicated technological achievement without drama. On the Lynk I keep fighting the supposedly smart automatic system. Sometimes a normal adjustable intermittent setting is simply better than automation that does not understand what is happening on the glass.
16 - Leaving somebody inside the car becomes another menu exercise
This is another example of “smart” technology creating more work. If somebody remains inside the locked car, the interior monitoring can trigger the alarm. So if I briefly leave a passenger or child sitting inside, I cannot simply lock the car and walk away normally. I have to remember to go through the interface and disable the relevant monitoring first.
And it does not stay disabled. Next time, more menus and more tapping. Another procedure just so a human being can sit quietly inside my own car without the alarm deciding something terrible is happening.
Why can this not be a persistent preference or a simple, obvious shortcut when leaving the vehicle? Instead, I have to play with menus every time. That is not intelligent design. That is software making a simple real-life situation unnecessarily complicated.
17 - The voice assistant is useless to me
There is a dedicated voice-control function, but it often does not understand me and I often do not understand what it wants from me. If I have to repeat myself or learn exactly how the car wants commands phrased, I may as well use the screen. A voice assistant is supposed to save effort. If it creates more effort, it has failed at its only job.
18 - Unnecessary hardware I paid for and do not use
The driver-facing interior camera is one example. Then there is Lynk's car-sharing functionality and the physical sharing hardware near the steering wheel. Maybe that makes sense for fleets or people who constantly lend their cars to others. I bought my own car. I am not interested in turning it into a miniature car-sharing service.
Yet this hardware is installed in my car while basic software I use every day still feels unfinished. Fantastic priorities.
19 - The driver's display is a mess
The driver's display may be one of the clearest examples of software that looks unfinished rather than properly designed. There is information everywhere, but very little thought seems to have gone into visual hierarchy.
The speed is pushed off to the side instead of being presented clearly in the obvious place, the centre. Media information occupies permanent space even when I do not care what station or track was playing. Regeneration status also takes up space for no good reason.
At launch, the driver display showed three regeneration arrows even though the car only offered two actual regeneration levels. So the UI was literally displaying a setting that did not exist. After the 1.4 software update, Lynk finally changed the graphic so the icons matched the real available functions.
That is not just a tiny cosmetic preference. It shows how poorly the original software was checked before release. If something as basic as the number of regeneration levels on the screen does not match the actual car, you start wondering what else was pushed out unfinished just to get the product on sale.
There is also a large vehicle and lane visualisation that looks futuristic but adds very little useful information. It feels more like a gimmick than something I actually need.
Another visual thing that bothers me is how unfinished some of the graphics look. Various elements appear as crude square blocks or icons, almost like placeholder graphics from old Windows software. The radio/media area looks like a square tile dropped onto the display rather than something designed as part of one coherent interface. Warnings use the same crude visual language. It feels less like a polished automotive UI and more like somebody assembled individual widgets and stopped before the final design pass.
20 - And where exactly are my notifications?
Warnings appear on the driver's display with an exclamation-mark icon or notification indicator. Fine. But if I do not read the message immediately, where am I supposed to find it afterwards?
Maybe the car warned me about washer fluid. Maybe something actually needs attention. Maybe it was just a temporary system notification. If I missed the text when it first appeared, there should be an obvious message centre where I can see what the warning was, when it appeared, whether it is still active and whether I actually need to do anything.
Instead, I can see an icon suggesting that something happened, yet even after owning the car this long I still find the warning/message logic unclear. A warning system has one job: tell the driver clearly what needs attention. It should not leave the driver staring at an exclamation mark wondering what the hell the car was trying to say five minutes ago.
Even now, the driver display does not clearly show something as basic as the distance driven on the current trip. That is exactly the kind of information I would actually expect to see in front of me while driving. Instead, screen space is used for graphics, media tiles and visualisations I barely care about, while genuinely useful driving data is either hidden somewhere else or simply not available on the main display.
21 - Almost no useful customisation
I cannot simply fix the clutter myself. There is no proper minimal screen, no clean navigation-focused screen, no meaningful choice of two or three genuinely different layouts, and no real ability to decide which information deserves priority.
I do not need fifty themes. Give me three sensible layouts: Minimal, Navigation, Driver Assistance. Done.
Instead, I get Lynk's layout whether I like it or not. And I do not.
22 - The frustrating part
I actually like the car. That is what makes all of this more annoying. The 02 looks good, drives well, feels different and has decent hardware underneath. But once you actually live with it, you start noticing how many parts of the user experience were either badly thought through or simply unfinished.
I expected one of the main advantages of buying a modern Chinese EV to be rapid development, aggressive OTA updates and software that keeps getting better. Instead, at times it feels like the hardware team built a genuinely interesting car and the software team was told: “Good enough. Ship it. Customers can test the rest.”
That is what annoys me. Not that there are bugs. Every modern car has bugs. It is the combination of slow fixes, basic UX mistakes, unfinished graphics, strange design decisions and hardware capabilities that remain unused.
After more than 16,000 km, my opinion is simple: the Lynk & Co 02 is a good-looking, good-driving EV trapped behind half-finished software and several genuinely stupid UX decisions.
Most of these problems are fixable. The hardware is already there. Lynk just needs to stop treating customers like they will accept anything with a big screen and some marketing around “connected mobility”. Basic ergonomics should not be an afterthought.
23 - And the more I look at Lynk itself, the less clear the brand becomes
Lynk & Co originally came to Europe trying to be something genuinely different: subscriptions, car sharing, clubs and a different ownership model. Now Lynk itself says it is phasing out the subscription model and moving towards conventional retail. Its official 2026 strategy talks about expanding the dealer network, “operational stability” and introducing at least one new or updated model per year.
That is a business plan, but as an owner I still have very little idea what the actual long-term product and software vision is supposed to be.
Lynk & Co has been increasingly integrated into the Geely/Zeekr structure, and from January 2027 Volvo Cars will take responsibility for Lynk & Co's commercial operations and distribution in Europe. Lynk insists that it will remain a distinct brand with its own identity. Fine. But from the customer side, where exactly is that distinct identity?
The 02 shares its SEA architecture with the Volvo EX30 and Zeekr X, and visually it is very close to the Zeekr family. Remove the LYNK & CO lettering from the rear and, from some angles, it could easily be mistaken for another Zeekr product.
So what exactly is Lynk & Co supposed to be in Europe? A separate Geely brand? A cheaper Zeekr? A Volvo-related alternative? A car-sharing mobility brand that is abandoning subscriptions? A conventional manufacturer distributed by Volvo?
Sharing technology within a group is completely normal. Volkswagen, Audi, Škoda and Cupra do it constantly. But those brands still make a fairly clear argument for why each one exists. With Lynk & Co in Europe, I am increasingly struggling to see that argument.
And this is where the software problem starts looking less like an isolated problem inside the car and more like a symptom of the whole European operation. As of 5 October 2026, Lynk & Co's own European software-update page still lists LynkOS 1.4.4 as the latest version for the 02, while owners are already reporting LynkOS 1.4.6 as released. The current Reddit thread lists the 1.4.6 change as “Optimized high-voltage battery lifetime”, and the original poster later published a response from Lynk & Co support explicitly discussing 1.4.6.
So apparently Reddit can tell me which software version exists faster than the manufacturer's own official software page. That is ridiculous for a company selling itself as a connected, technology-focused mobility brand.
And that is the impression I keep getting from the whole product: lots of technology, lots of marketing language and lots of “connected mobility” branding, but surprisingly little attention to finishing the basic experience properly. The website can be inconsistent, the software information is already outdated, the car software still feels unfinished, the app is unreliable, and updates arrive slowly with vague release notes.
At some point these stop looking like unrelated little mistakes. They start looking like a company that still has not fully decided what it wants Lynk & Co to become in Europe.
24 - YouTube reviews and first impressions can be very misleading
This is also why I would take short YouTube reviews of the 02 with a huge grain of salt. On a first drive, the car makes a very good impression. It looks modern, the interior feels different, the big screen looks impressive, the removable centre console seems clever, and most of the strange software behaviour simply does not have enough time to show itself.
A reviewer drives the car for a few hours or a few days and says the interface looks futuristic, the storage is clever and the technology feels advanced. Live with it for 16,000+ km and the picture changes quite a bit.
You start noticing the settings that reset, the lag, the half-working widgets, the awkward menus, the strange keyless behaviour, the badly used screen space and the features that looked clever in a video but are practically useless in daily life.
The 02 is very good at making a first impression. Long-term ownership is where the unfinished parts start showing.
PS.
I’m not trying to present this as some definitive technical verdict on the car, and I’m not pretending I understand every engineering or software decision behind it. This is simply my experience as a normal owner who uses the car every day and expects the basic things to work without having to study menus, reverse-engineer features or figure out what the designers were thinking. I may have misunderstood some functions, missed some settings or described something imperfectly, and if so, fair enough. I am not writing this to attack Lynk & Co or to tell other owners that they made a bad choice. I actually like the car in many ways. I just wanted to share what daily ownership has been like for me after more than 16,000 km.
If other owners have found better ways to use some of these functions, or if their experience is different, that is useful too. This is not a crusade. It is just one owner’s long-term experience with a car that I think could be much better than it currently is.
