Jaecoo 7 review

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Chery’s SUV brand hits the UK with a family PHEV that’s big on value

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The Jaecoo 7 extends the number of Chinese-built and -branded, budget-priced, plug-in hybrid, family-sized SUVs competing for attention in the UK to three.

That may not sound like the most extensive selection. In fact, it’s barely worth coining a collective noun for (though feel free, if you’re so inclined). And yet, when you look at what most European brands offer with cars like this in comparison and how much they expect to charge, you realise in an instant how serious these Asian brands are about making significant inroads into UK market share – and how well-placed, on the face of things, they seem to be to make them.

The 7, then, is here to lock horns with the at least fairly well-established MG HS PHEV and the slightly less well-known but well-backed BYD Seal U DM-i (meanwhile the Leapmotor C10 REEV will arrive in the UK very soon, to turn this competitive Chinese trio into a quartet). It’s out to earn the favour of private and fleet buyers alike, who see no reason why they shouldn’t be able to get a family-sized, plug-in hybrid car for the sort of money that certainly wouldn’t buy them such a vehicle in very many other showrooms.

This car will be available as a conventional petrol-powered option as well, for less outlay still. However, it’s the PHEV version that the company behind it – Chinese manufacturing giant Chery, which also owns and operates the Omoda brand – expects to account for the greater part of the sales mix.

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DESIGN & STYLING

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Jaecoo J7 RT 2025 Review C Pillar 22

While its sibling brand Omoda focuses on sleeker-looking crossovers, Jaecoo – whose name is a portmanteau of ‘Jaeger’, the German word for hunter or soldier, and, rather nauseatingly, ‘cool’ – will focus on more versatile, rugged and capable SUVs. Or so we are told. 

Its debut model, the 7, can be had with part-time four-wheel drive as a conventional petrol variant and the car’s 200mm of ground clearance and 600mm wading depth do indeed beat at least some mid-sized SUVs. But if Chery wanted to make a statement about the capability and ruggedness of its new Jaecoo brand, leading with a plug-in hybrid model that is resolutely front-wheel drive only, in a niche where at least one PHEV opponent does offer four driven wheels, seems a slightly odd choice.

There’s a hint of the 1980s sci-fi blockbuster about the font that displays Jaecoo’s brand name on the bootlid. Could that be Robocop at the wheel? Nope, but he’d certainly do a better job than the automatic lane keeping.
Matt Saunders
Road test editor

But that choice keeps the Jaecoo 7 at least reasonably light, simple and efficient, of course. This is a 4.5m-long, five-seat SUV sized roughly like a Nissan Qashqai or Kia Sportage, though it is styled to ape premium SUVs – most notably, the Range Rover Evoque and Velar. It’s a simplistic tactic and for some it might well prove effective enough, but others tend to double-take with a mix of puzzlement and incredulity when they see the car.

Both conventional petrol and PHEV models use transversely mounted four-cylinder engines. The petrol version employs a 1.6-litre turbocharged unit with 145bhp going to the front wheels via a standard seven-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox. 

But the PHEV adopts Chery’s fifth-generation SHS (Super Hybrid System), which it rather immodestly acclaims as the most thermally efficient hybrid powertrain in the world. At its heart is a 1.5-litre turbocharged petrol engine running on the Miller combustion cycle. This unit is hooked up to the wheels via Chery’s own CVT-style hybrid transmission and in parallel with the car’s main AC synchronous drive motor, for 201bhp of total system power and 229lb ft of combined system torque (which, a little confusingly, are also the peak outputs of the main electric drive motor). 

Electric current for the powertrain is stored in a lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) drive battery of 18.3kWh of total installed capacity, for a claimed electric range of 56 miles. 

The car’s chassis and suspension are pretty class typical: steel monocoque, and MacPherson struts at the front and multiple links at the rear, with coil springs and conventional anti-roll bars all round. Our test car weighed 1814kg on the proving ground scales, which is within 20kg of its claimed kerb weight, and the weight was distributed 58% over the front and 42% over the rear. 

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INTERIOR

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Jaecoo J7 RT 2025 Review dash 19

The Jaecoo 7 is a fairly practical and well-packaged mid-sized family SUV, except in one particular area.

The driving position is higher than in some cars of this kind. The driver’s seat itself feels a bit flat and lacks useful cushion angle adjustment, and the steering column is likewise a little short on telescopic reach adjustment. On both accounts, longer-legged drivers aren’t catered to terrifically well here, although none of our testers found it impossible to achieve a comfortable driving position ultimately. 

The electric window switches have some material glitz but so seem to work counter-intuitively. Push them forward to lower the glass; pull them back to raise it again.
Matt Saunders
Road test editor

The car is available in both Deluxe and Luxury trim levels, the former in combination with the car’s conventional petrol engine only. Wider test experience has taught us that in that lower-tier trim, the 7’s cabin comes across as a little plain and feels cheap in places. With an SHS Luxury model, however, there’s a modicum of richness to the car’s fascia panels, air vent fixtures and minor switchgear, which ensures that any real semblance of austerity or cheapness is avoided.

A digital instrument screen and head-up display sit in front of the driver and a 14.8in portrait-orientated multimedia touchscreen dominates an otherwise sparsely turned-out dashboard and centre stack. There is one line of only the most basic physical switchgear. For almost everything else – including heating and ventilation control, door mirror adjustment and more – you must dive into the screen’s various menus. 

Second-row occupant space is pretty respectable (typical rear leg room of 750mm is identical to that of a Kia Sportage, which the Jaecoo beats for head room). But boot space is the key disappointment: it’s a fairly shallow cargo bay by SUV standards and there isn’t much usable underfloor space, though it’d still offer more capacity than most bigger hatchbacks with the roller cover removed and loaded above the window line. 

Multimedia

The 14.8in upright touchscreen in the Jaecoo 7 looks a lot like a mid-range tablet PC that has been plonked onto the middle of the dashboard – and it’s much the same to use. There are long and complex menu structures that seem to demand as much of your attention as a regular tablet might and its left-sided list navigation isn’t easy to reach from the right side of the cabin. 

The screen has very few permanently displayed controls, so most processes require three, four or five inputs. Even simple tasks such as adjusting the door mirrors or turning up the air conditioning distract you more than they might, especially since the car’s screen-born heater controls are only visible when you switch out of Apple CarPlay mode – which we spent a lot of time using because the car’s native software isn’t very good. 

Our Luxury-grade test car did offer factory navigation but needed an app download, the registration of personal information and the input of both the engine and chassis numbers to activate it, so we used Apple CarPlay for navigation, which was reliable though it was not easy to switch back and forth with the native menu software.

ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

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Jaecoo J7 RT 2025 Review rear corner 43

Among the strengths of the Jaecoo 7’s petrol-electric powertrain, we can certainly credit good mechanical isolation, fairly strong and seamless accelerator response, and good urban efficiency (to which we’ll come shortly).

It behaves more like a series-hybrid arrangement at low speeds than a parallel one. The car negotiates town roads as though it were entirely electric, with the combustion engine remaining disconnected from the drive wheels and running only to generate current as needed. 

Plenty of performance is on tap even without direct piston power. The proof of that came during our recorded standing start acceleration runs when, even under full throttle, the moment at which the combustion engine fully connected to the driving wheels, above 50mph, could clearly be felt.

In its slightly mysterious way, then, the Jaecoo 7 SHS got to 62mph from rest in 7.7sec, 0.8sec sooner than the claims said it should. It never felt sluggish or flustered, even during motorway driving, and it remained fairly refined even with its piston engine running hard in the background.

There are a great many driving modes to tinker with – almost certainly more than there need to be. You can run the car in EV or HEV modes, the former only when there’s enough charge in the battery. In HEV, you can choose between Initial, Smart and Forced hybrid running regimes. Initial prioritises electric running until the battery’s flat; Forced allows you to pick a battery charge percentage for the hybrid system to maintain; and Smart lets the car decide how much charge to maintain in its drive battery based on various inputs. 

With all of those modes, however, the car will almost always protect an indicated baseline battery charge level of about 15% to 20%. In practice, this means that while the instruments will tell you there’s still somewhere between eight and 12 miles of electric range left to use, the hybrid system won’t actually let you access them. Not, that is, until you find the EV+ driving mode hidden away on another touchscreen menu, which opens up those last few miles but which, a warning message advises, “is only to be used in emergency situations”. 

So what would otherwise be fairly simple top-level drivability in the Jaecoo 7 is rendered rather complicated and ultimately a little frustrating. The company would do much better to simply forget the EV+ mode, recalibrate the car’s electric range instrumentation and give the driver unfettered access to whatever really usable EV range remains – as most PHEV manufacturers do.

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RIDE & HANDLING

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It’s the habit of new entrants into the European car market to seek to reassure buyers about the quality of their wares with mention of technical centres in Germany and of extensive programmes of suspension and steering development on the roads of our continent. 

Chery does indeed have such a centre itself (in Frankfurt), where this car and the recent Omoda 5 were supposedly finished and fine-tuned. Yet even so, when we tested the Omoda 5 late last year, it fell some way short of the dynamic sophistication you’d expect of a European-developed car in a few notable areas. And, in its own different ways and perhaps by a narrower margin, the Jaecoo 7 does as well. 

This, broadly speaking, is a fairly competent, comfortable and predictable car to drive. It has a medium-soft ride; medium-light steering; grip levels that narrowly exceed the bounds of the adequate without straying much further; and body control that allows it to remain reasonably secure and contained at typical UK roads speeds without providing much that will interest its driver. 

So much is about what you’d expect for this type of car. And if the car did all that without the hint of woodenness that frequently causes its ride to fidget – or perhaps with a little more traction and composure to spare, or greater precision or tactile feel through the steering – it might create at least some dynamic identity, or otherwise escape the pervading sense of anonymity that characterises it. 

As it is, though, the Jaecoo 7 is a broadly inoffensive if bland and unenticing car to drive.

Assisted Driving

The Jaecoo 7 has the kind of ADAS functions that you’re very unlikely to forget to disable once you’ve sampled them – even if that means delaying every journey by 30 seconds and toggling them off one by one on the car’s lengthy assistance screen checklist, before engaging drive. 

The driver monitoring system is irritatingly over-sensitive about the direction of your gaze and the active lane keeping system fights you for fine control of lane positioning when it’s active but drops out much too often to be worth using at all. 

Add in extra bonging from the speed governance system and you could easily be driven to distraction within a few short miles. This is not what driver assistance should feel like – and nor has the accessibility of the controls while driving really been spared a thought.

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MPG & RUNNING COSTS

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The Jaecoo 7 has a sizable value advantage over equivalent plug-in hybrid SUVs from most European brands and few people would disagree that it’s a biggish car with an efficient and advanced hybrid system for a reasonable price. It is, however, pricier than the equivalent MG HS and roughly equalled on value by its opposite-number BYD Seal U – and both of those rivals have bigger drive batteries and better electric range. 

However, the Jaecoo hits back with particularly impressive urban efficiency. Our test car averaged 68.0mpg on our low-speed everyday efficiency test. We had to work that out using a fairly obscure – but, thankfully, resettable – indication of overall fuel used that’s buried within the car’s infotainment system, though. That’s because, for some reason, the Jaecoo 7 doesn’t have a conventional, resettable trip computer. 

Instead, it displays a rolling 50km indication of recent efficiency for both the electric and combustion elements of the hybrid system, which would be at least a little useful if the data it conveyed weren’t so laughably inaccurate. On our test car, the ‘mpkWh’ electric efficiency routinely indicated in excess of 1000 and yet the ‘mpg’ petrol efficiency indicator seemed incapable of rising beyond 60 and frequently declined to improve even during extended engine-off running. 

We can only hope this was a software calibration glitch particular to our test car. If not, an efficient family car should certainly be better able to give itself due credit in one of the few places where it’s genuinely deserved.

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VERDICT

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Jaecoo J7 RT 2025 Review front static 33

The Jaecoo 7 is a more competent and complete family car than many might expect from a brand they’ve never heard of. For those seeking a family-friendly budget PHEV, it might be worth a test drive. 

But unless you have extraordinary patience, it’s likely to be the shortest test drive you’ve taken. If you’re like us, you’ll notice that the car is efficient, quite refined and digitally well-equipped for the money. But also that it’s so irksome, distracting and poorly calibrated with much of that same digital technology, and with so many other rather careless elements of its fine-tuning, that your faith in the integrity of the product as a whole will be seriously undermined. 

The Jaecoo 7 is also almost entirely flavourless to drive - which, among a set of increasingly insipid modern electrified SUVs, is saying something.

Matt Saunders

Matt Saunders Autocar
Title: Road test editor

As Autocar’s chief car tester and reviewer, it’s Matt’s job to ensure the quality, objectivity, relevance and rigour of the entirety of Autocar’s reviews output, as well contributing a great many detailed road tests, group tests and drive reviews himself.

Matt has been an Autocar staffer since the autumn of 2003, and has been lucky enough to work alongside some of the magazine’s best-known writers and contributors over that time. He served as staff writer, features editor, assistant editor and digital editor, before joining the road test desk in 2011.

Since then he’s driven, measured, lap-timed, figured, and reported on cars as varied as the Bugatti Veyron, Rolls-Royce Phantom, Tesla Roadster, Ariel Hipercar, Tata Nano, McLaren Senna, Renault Twizy and Toyota Mirai. Among his wider personal highlights of the job have been covering Sebastien Loeb’s record-breaking run at Pikes Peak in 2013; doing 190mph on derestricted German autobahn in a Brabus Rocket; and driving McLaren’s legendary ‘XP5’ F1 prototype. His own car is a trusty Mazda CX-5.