Geely To Send Satellite To Space

Traditionally, when companies build cars, they tend to ground themselves by evolving and perfecting their bread and butter. None of them, except for perhaps Tesla, have probably ever thought of designing and building an out of this world machine to help them with this effort, until now, cause China's largest private automaker, Geely wants to build satelites to keep all of its cars connected.

Geely Group, which owns Swedish brand Volvo Cars, Malaysia's Proton and has a stake in Mercedes Benz's owner, Daimler said that it would invest $325m to build a new development centre and factory to manufacture satellites this year.

The move by Li Shufu, owner and founder of Geely drew a close comparison to Elon Musk.

The new Geely centre will design, build and test low-orbit communication satellites, which will then help improve geolocation of vehicles and to support their connected functions, Geely said.

With that being said, Financial Times recently reported that Blaine Curcio, founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting, a firm focusing on the business of space and satellite telecommunications thinks that Geely's attempt to send up a satellite in an already crowded orbital space will be difficult. 

"Mr Li also faces an uphill struggle to break into a crowded private space market. Geely may find it difficult to get a constellation of satellites launched in the near term as precedence is likely to be given to state-owned space giants. Groups such as the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation were far ahead of Geely in the race to get satellites into orbit, not to mention the degree to which they are also far ahead in terms of the political capital to do very hard things such as this" Mr Curcio added.