Geely is one of China’s largest privately owned car manufacturers, and unlike most of the brands featured on this site, it arrived in the UK already carrying a surprising amount of hidden familiarity. The company was established in 1986 by entrepreneur Li Shufu, originally making refrigerator parts before moving into motorcycles and eventually cars, with its automotive arm formally founded in 1997. It’s headquartered in Hangzhou, in China’s Zhejiang province.
Geely
Founded: 1997 (parent company founded 1986) HQ: Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China Parent: Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Official website ↗
Last updated: August 1, 2026
Geely Overview
What sets Geely apart from most other Chinese exporters is the sheer scale of what its parent company, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, already owns. Geely bought Volvo from Ford in 2010, took a significant stake in Mercedes-Benz’s parent company Daimler, and went on to acquire or invest in Lotus, the performance EV brand Polestar, the Malaysian marque Proton, and LEVC, the maker of London’s electric black cabs. It also created Zeekr as a standalone premium EV brand, and more recently launched Geely itself, the mainstream badge that appears on this page, as a dedicated export brand for international markets.
That last point matters. The Geely brand as sold in Britain and Europe is a genuinely new proposition, officially launched in the UK in October 2025, even though the wider Geely Auto Group has quietly been part of the fabric of British motoring for years through Volvo, Polestar, Lotus and LEVC’s taxis. Before entering the UK, Geely had already established itself in twelve other European countries, and the UK launch was explicitly framed as a hub for expanding further into markets like Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
Geely’s ambitions for the UK are substantial. The company has said it wants to sell 100,000 cars a year here by 2030, backed by a network of 100 dealerships by the end of 2026, and plans to bring ten different models to Britain over the next five years, roughly split between fully electric and plug in hybrid technology. It has also leaned on its existing British connections, working with Lotus Engineering to tune the ride and handling of its cars specifically for UK roads.
The Geely EX5, an electric compact SUV, was the brand’s first model here, launching in October 2025 as a rival to cars like the Kia EV3 and Skoda Elroq. It was followed in February 2026 by the Starray EM-i, a plug in hybrid SUV built on much of the same underlying architecture but swapping the EX5’s electric motor for a combined petrol and electric powertrain, aimed at buyers who want the benefits of electric driving without fully committing to an EV just yet.
A consistent theme across both cars, and likely future Geely models too, is an unusually long standard warranty, eight years and 125,000 miles on both the vehicle and its battery, among the most generous currently offered by any manufacturer selling in the UK, Chinese or otherwise. Combined with genuinely competitive pricing and the quiet reassurance of Geely’s existing UK footprint through its other brands, it’s a proposition that starts from a stronger position than most of the newer Chinese names arriving in Britain.
