Jaecoo J7 plug-in hybrid: early details and analysis
2025 is the year of new Chinese car brands arriving in Australia and the plug-in hybrid Jaecoo J7 is a promising medium SUV for families. Here’s what you need to know about these upstart carmakers and why it matters…
In one of the most competitive markets in the world, Chinese brands are about to overtake the Australian car market, and the latest plug-in hybrid looks like the catalyst for change.
Established Japanese and South Korean car brands have built their customer loyalty base, massive dealer networks and successfully taken over from the long dead Australian car manufacturing. But in 2025, they’re in trouble.
The foundations of this commercial takeover have been laid over the last 10 years and the status quo is about to change with the arrival of more than 10 Chinese brands keen to disrupt.
Only this time around, their products speak for themselves.
GWM (nee Great Wall Motors), MG, LDV, Haval, BYD, Chery, JAC, Deepal, Leapmotor, Zeekr, and Jaecoo (with more yet to come) have arrived in the Aussie car market. Some landed over the course of the last decade, and some as recently as the last six months - all of which are primed to upend big brands like Toyota, Hyundai, Mazda, Kia, Mitsubishi and Subaru.
With the likes of Honda, Nissan, Volkswagen and Jeep all knocking on Death’s door, commercially (at least here in Australia), this has the makings of an epic Hollywood blockbuster, only with car dealers and lots of corporate shenanigans.
In fact, brands like BYD, Chery, MG and GWM are already causing chaos for famous models like Hilux and Ranger, RAV4 and Sportage, and the latest entry Jaecoo has just offered a plug-in hybrid SUV that makes Mitsubishi’s premium-end Outlander PHEV look ridiculously overpriced.
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According to the latest VFACTS sales data:
BYD 2025 sales to the end of March were up 95 per cent - Ford is down 5 per cent;
GWM 2025 sales to the end of March are up 13 per cent - Hyundai was down 3 per cent in Feb;
Chery is up 216 per cent - Honda is down nearly 9 per cent;
Zeekr, which has only just opened in Australia in 2025, is on 99 units in less than two months, while nowhere-brand Peugeot managed just 99 sales in February and was down by 41 per cent compared with Feb ‘24;
Subaru is down 9 per cent, while LDV had a sluggish start to 2025, down 21 per cent, selling only two light commercial products in a small dealer network while Subaru sells five passenger products among a much bigger dealer footprint. Meaning, it’s very costly for Subaru dealers to maintain outgoing expenses than smaller LDV dealers.
These are just a few easy examples of what this fracturing foundation looks like for the big brands we’ve known for decades.
QUICK HISTORY: HOW DID WE GET HERE?
This is not a new phenomenon. It’s not the four horsemen of the automotive apocalypse. This has happened before.
About 15-20 years ago the South Korean brands Hyundai, Kia (and SsangYong, to a much lesser extent) did exactly the same thing to the Japanese brands.
The Japanese brands themselves had spent the previous 15-20 years fracturing the captured market Holden and Ford enjoyed before Toyota, Mitsubishi, Mazda and Subaru taught them a thing or two about reliability, affordability and customer support.
In fairly recent history, the Holden Captiva was notoriously unreliable, poorly supported, and was a rip-off compared with the smooth, grunty, reliable diesels available in a Hyundai Santa Fe or Kia Sorento.
The i30 and Cerato were infinitely more dependable as cheap family transport compared with the shitbox Holden Cruze and Ford Focus, in the same way a Toyota Corolla, Mazda 3 and Mitsubishi Lancer has been superior small cars compared with the Holden Gemini and Ford Sierra, Focus and Fiesta.
When Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Mazda and Subaru arrived in the 1970s and spent the next 20 years growing. They were called ‘Jap Crap’ because they lacked the machismo, clout and durability of Fords and Holdens.
But they were cheap, and they drank less fuel than the Australian- and American-engined competition like Commodores and Falcons. Worse for Holden and Ford was the Japanese quality never stopped improving, the prices remained highly competitive and they never recovered after the VT Commodore and BA Falcon.
Toyota LandCruisers, Nissan Patrols and Mitsubishi Pajeros were also more capable and reliable than the Holden Jackeroos and Land Rovers of the same period. Japanese small cars were frugal, bulletproof, safer, offered more features and spare parts weren’t extortionate. But then the South Koreans did the same magic act and today they’re line-ball on reliability, build quality and affordability.
The sentiment was made clear of “cheap, Chinese” cars in the late 2000s and early 2010s that they would never last, couldn’t go the distance and were deathtraps. That legacy is fading today.
GWM Steed utes and G10 vans were poor quality and Chery vehicles scored terribly in ANCAP crash testing (back when ANCAP was about engineering and safety, not marketing). After a couple of attempts, the Chinese brands GWM and Chery gave up, before MG and LDV tried again in the mid-2010s to very limited success. It’s really only LDV that has held on thus far with the T60 before GWM came back with a vengeful new ‘Ute’ in the late 2010s.
But look what’s happening to the sales of Chinese cars today compared with South Korean and Japanese brands:
Annual Australian sales by origin, 2018-2024
What the data in this graph is showing you is the stagnation of sales to Korean brands (caused by a number of factors including a decade-long failure to offer a ute), the Japanese brands maintaining the status quo… and the daunting momentum shown by Chinese brands.
In the 10 years it’s taken Hyundai-Kia to get its priorities straight and offer a ute in the ute-lusting capital of the world, where Hilux, Ranger, Triton and D-Max have been top 10 models for a decade, it’s too little too late for Kia Tasman.
Meanwhile, Chinese brands like LDV and GWM (and soon MG) have been selling their respective utes, however poor their first iterations were compared with the leaders, to steady, consistent success. Now, their latest versions are pretty bloody good, for the price.
Now Jaecoo arrives with a vehicle that offers the potential to knock another sales behemoth off its perch - the Toyota RAV4 - which means the Kia Sportage hybrid, which is barely a 2 year-old model here in Australia, is going to be completely outgunned in terms of value and performance.
Jaecoo J7 plug-in hybrid arrives highly competitive with Korean and Japanese equivalents - and it’s their first attempt…
A fully specced-up RAV4, the Edge, offers on-demand all-wheel drive, a 1.6 kWh nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) battery that makes 28kW in addition to the 135kW produced by the 2.5 atmo petrol 4-cylinder - total of 163kW. Price: over $60,000.
Kia Sportage hybrid? Roughly $58,000 driveaway.
FEATURES & PRICING
JAECOO J7 PLUG-IN HYBRID
Priced at just $48,000 (driveaway) the J7 offers a compelling reason not to buy a Toyota RAV4 or Kia Sportage hybrid in 2025, both of which are more than $10,000 more expensive.
Core 2WD | $35,000 driveaway
10.25-inch driver’s display
13.2-inch infotainment touchscreen
Wireless Apple CarPlay & Android Auto
Satnav
LED headlights (projector type)
Track 2WD | $38,000 driveaway
Electric tailgate
Front parking sensors
360-degree camera
Driver knee airbag
Heated front seats
Dual-zone automatic air conditioning
Sony 8-speaker sound system
12-volt outlet (boot)
50 Watt wireless phone charger
Rain-sensing front wipers
Acoustic glass windscreen
Colour ambient lighting
Ridge AWD | $43,000 driveaway
19-inch alloy wheels (full-size spare)
14.8-inch infotainment touchscreen
Panoramic sunroof
Driver seat with memory function (including mirror position)
Heated steering wheel
Ventilated front seats
4 AWD modes (snow/mud/sand/off-road)
In-built dashcam
Puddle lights
SHS Summit (hybrid) FWD | $48,000 driveaway
Intelligent voice command (called “Hello Jaecoo”)
Wireless Apple CarPlay & Android Auto
Colour ambient lighting (dashboard and doors)
Dual-zone climate control
Sony 8-speaker sound system
Head-up display (HUD)
Inbuilt GPS Navigation
Perforated synthetic leather seats
Panoramic sunroof
14.8” LCD infotainment touchscreen
50W wireless phone charger
360-degree camera
Electric tailgate
19-inch “aero” alloy wheel (space-saver spare)
17 advanced driver aid system
3 Drive modes – (Eco/Normal/Sport)
EV & HEV drive modes
ENGINE
You get a 1.6-litre turbocharged petrol engine making 137kW of peak power, and 275Nm of peak torque. It’s a front-wheel drive driveline in the Core and Track variants, and on-demand all-wheel drive in the Ridge variant. That’s for the combustion-only J7 range, which take 95 RON fuel, by the way.
The combustion-only version of J7 gets a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission, available on either the front-drive or all-wheel drive model grades. The hybrid has a single-ration reduction gear as typical with other plug-in hybrids and EVs.
Both hybrid & combustion-only engines require premium 95 RON petrol…
For what they’re calling the SHS or ‘Super Hybrid System’, you get a 18.3kWh Lithium Iron Phosphate battery pack which Jaecoo claims can be charged from 30 per cent up to 80 per cent in as little as 20 minutes, providing you’re able to find a DC fast charger delivering up to 40kW.
At or above a 30% state of charge, the J7 can be driven in EV mode up to 120km/h, thanks to the single AC electric motor that makes 150kW and 310Nm of almost instantaneous torque.
The combustion side of the powertrain in the hybrid uses a 1.6-litre turbo-petrol unit, but only makes 105kW of peak power and 215Nm of torque, obviously de-tuned to make it a more sedate vehicle to drive, as well as keep emissions down, reduce fuel consumption and increase reliability.
The hybrid J7 is front-wheel drive only, however, so tractive effort is sent though what Jaecoo calls a ‘Dedicated Hybrid Transmission’, but which is just a single-ratio reduction gear transaxle.
The powertrain can be used in series or parallel hybrid mode, as well as purely electric mode and using kinetic energy recovery (regenerative braking).
Jaecoo claims a total driving range of 1200km, which is ambitious to say the least with a 60-litre fuel tank. This includes up to 106km (using the wildly optimistic NEDC test cycle regime) of EV-only range, meaning you should expect between 60-80km of real-world driving range in EV mode.
Warranty is 8 years and unlimited kilometres. Servicing is $3372 over eight years, which is about $400 on average per year, but it’s more like $299 for the first three years, then $499 for years four and 5, $399 for year six, $299 in year seven, and lastly $779 to hit you on year eight.
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MAIN COMPETITORS
Here are the key points of comparison between the Jaecoo J7 SHS (hybrid) and the best you can get from the established brands.
KIA SPORTAGE HYBRID GT-LINE | $60,000 driveaway ($12,000 more)
Click here for more on Kia Sportage hybrid >>
Less power: 132kW Kia Sportage VS 150kW for the electric side of the Jaecoo J7 PHEV (total combined: unknown, TBC);
Less torque: 265Nm Kia Sportage VS 310Nm for Jaecoo J7 PHEV;
Both are front-wheel drive;
18-inch alloys on Kia Sportage GT-Line hybrid VS 19-inch alloys on the J7 PHEV (not that this matters a great deal).
LENGTH: Sportage hybrid is 4660mm VS Jaecoo J7 hybrid is 4500mm - that’s a 10cm difference
HEIGHT: Sportage hybrid is 1665mm tall VS the J7 at 1680mm - J7 is 15mm taller
WHEELBASE: Sportage hybrid 2755mm VS the J7’s 2672mm - so just 8.3cm difference in passenger legroom
PAYLOAD: Sportage hybrid carries 432kg max. VS the J7 carrying 379kg - that’s 12 per cent more to the Sportage
TOWING: Sportage GT-Line can tow 1650kg (braked) with 100kg of towball download VS an as-yet unknown towing specification for the Jaecoo J7.
You can surmise that if the J7’s towing capability was something worthy of bragging rights it would be stated. But given the GVM is just 2210kg and the kerb weight is 1831kg already, it’s going to be quite poor for towing.
MITSUBISHI OUTLANDER EXCEED TOURER PHEV | $80,000 driveaway ($22,000 more)
Click here for more on Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV >>
Click here for more on Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross plug-in hybrid >>
Outlander is a 7-seater whereas the J7 is a 5-seater, so there is legitimately extra practicality for the Outlander, that’s a fact.
Outlander PHEV is 4710mm long whereas the J7 is 4500mm long - just 20cm difference - making the Jaecoo slightly shorter than the Outlander, but about 45mm longer than the Eclipse Cross (PHEV or standard).
The dimensions are close. Outlander has a wheelbase 2706mm long, meaning that the J7, with its 2672mm wheelbase, has just 34mm less for cabin legroom, which is negligible. The 180mm of additional height should provide more headroom over the J7 if you’re on the taller side.
Battery-for-battery the J7 is closer to the Outlander PHEV than the Eclipse Cross PHEV, but the J7 costs even less than the Eclipse Cross PHEV despite the Mitsubishi’s $62,000 pricetag and a 13kWh battery.
Outlander is also all-wheel drive, which requires an electric motor in the back end, which requires wiring, R&D (like tuning and calibration), and it needs to be sufficiently robust to last Mitsubishi’s 10-year warranty period, notionally.
There’s 609kg of payload in the Outlander, whereas there’s just 416 in the J7 if you take the GVM and take away the tare mass. Putting five adults in that J7 you’re potentially going to be quite close to the payload limit.
There’s a 1650kg towing capacity on the Outlander PHEV, whereas we don’t know yet on the J7.
The J7 with an unknown total system power output (for now) is most likely going to have a ballpark 200-250kW and a maximum of roughly 450-500Nm of torque will be on par with the Outlander PHEV - but being lighter will be an advantage for the Jaecoo’s performance.
Weight is interesting. Tare is 2.1 tonnes for the Outlander PHEV and 1.8 tonnes for the J7 PHEV. That’s 300kg extra in the Mitsubishi, owing to its extra size, extra seats, the more capable drivetrain, slightly bigger battery and the bigger wheels.
Fuel required is 95 RON for both, and 20-inch alloys on the Mitsubishi won’t be any benefit or deficit against the 19s on the J7.
You just need to decide if the extra cash and equipment is worth it - that’s entirely your decision.
BUYING CHINESE
Let’s be very clear here about what this report is about. It’s about the product as it stands on sale here in Australia.
This is not about the geopolitics between the notional democratic, capitalist West and the notionally communistic, authoritarian China. we’re talking about the product a company intends to sell to consumers here in Australia and whether it is justified for the price.
So try your hardest to leave preconceived politics and xenophobia at the door and look at the Jaecoo J7 on merit, just as we might with any vehicle that comes from South Korea, Japan, Thailand, or India - or indeed developing nations like the US, the UK, or Europe.
TEST DRIVES
Driving a Jaecoo J7 is going to give you plenty of raised eyebrows, inquisitive index fingers, and it will have that new car smell.
A test drive will tell you how comfy the seats are on built-up suburban roads, it’ll tell you how the brakes feel easing up at the traffic lights and you’ll get an early indication of what the performance is like up to about 50-70km/h - if the traffic is good.
A test drive will let you try out the Sony stereo, play with the cool vertically positioned window switches, and have a play with the steering wheel controls as well as the central touchscreen and see if you can connect your phone and figure out how to turn off the driver “assist” features like lane-keeping and speed alerts.
Then, when you pull back into the dealership, you can have a go dropping the rear seats, seeing how much space is in the boot and maybe even lift up the boot floor to see what kind of spare-wheel situation you have going on. (Hint: It’ll be a space-saver or a tyre repair kit.)
But a 10 minute test drive cannot tell you what’s going to happen to the brand and its dealer network in the next five-or-more years, or how easily or convoluted it’s going to be to fix bugs, remove gremlins or diagnose some unforeseen problem.
There’s absolutely zero corporate history to go by at this point. If someone like Toyota, Mitsubishi Mazda, Hyundai or Kia (for example) bring out anew model, you have something to go by. You can make valued judgements about how they’ve treated you in the past, you can assess their back catalogue of cars and be impressed by a sibling or friend’s vehicle of the same brand.
This all helps inform you about the kind of company and product you’re getting into bed with, so to speak, for the next 3, 5 or maybe 8 years.
These established brands we’ve all become accustomed to, they have clout, they’ve got huge resources invested in still being here if/when you have a technical problem, there are small armies of trained technicians waiting to help you diagnose and sort a problem. There is a baseline to go off.
But we don’t know a thing about how Jaecoo is going to comport itself in the market. They could be the next Volkswagen Dieselgate waiting in the wings or the next Jeep ready to issue gag orders en masse. They could go the way of Tesla and become a laughing stock with a laughable stock price.
Or, Jaecoo Australia might be gearing up to show the big brands a new level of customer satisfaction consumers have never seen before.
We simply won’t know until enough time has passed and enough vehicles have hit the road for the big, expensive mad experiment.
BIG QUESTIONS
If you’re thinking about one of these cars, it’s hard to advise you on what to do next. A test drive might tell you how nice or rough it is to actually drive, use and sit in for 10 minutes around the dealer’s test drive route.
But it’s not going to answer bigger, more important questions around viability. There’s zero background on Jaecoo to go on. You don’t have a baseline.
We don’t know if Jaecoo is going to be good at fault-finding in the service department, if they’re going to provide in-depth technical training for staff, how big the dealer network is going to be outside of capital cities and what the spare parts inventory is going to be like.
You might also be quite willing to give them a try and be a lab rat, so to speak, and that’s okay. It’s absolutely allowed.
Or you can choose to wait 12 months and see how the experiment rolls.
However, if you need a plug-in hybrid now, effectively, and you don’t have $80,000 to spend, it might be feasible to take a punt on a new brand’s first new model here in Australia. It depends on you.
Longevity and reliability are another question. You don’t want to get five years into this ownership and find the panels are rusting because of inferior metal surface treatment - not suggesting that’s going to happen - but it might. We don’t know yet.
We know how good Toyota, Subaru, Mitsubishi, Hyundai and Kia are at customer support, build quality, long-term durability.
A test drive at this point is going to tell you about ergonomics, design and execution, road-holding and sound attenuation, and you could even find yourself getting comfortable with the driver assistance (ADAS) features and the driver stalking camera.
But you simply won’t have a handle on how Jaecoo will comport itself commercially when or if you have problems down the track.
Australia has third-world roads and first-world expectations of our cars. On-road calibration is going to be the weakest link, most likely, in the Jaecoo J7. They haven’t done any local Australian testing and calibration of suspension, steering and handling.
The Chinese brands simply haven’t had enough time and investment to understanding our unique market. Our expectations are quite demanding. And you can bet the ADAS systems will be intrusive and completely over-bearing, as other brands have already demonstrated in the last 6-12 months.
The biggest problem for the industry here is how an established carmaker, like Kia, with its Sportage hybrid, compete with the Jaecoo J7 SHS. How does Mitsubishi compete with the Outlander PHEV against a vehicle that performs virtually the same for $30,000 more?
There’s no way the product planning teams at these big carmakers and the factory back in Japan or South Korean can slash these kinds of margins out of their products to compete with the Chinese brands.
Their only saving grace, it seems, is going to be short-term quality over quantity - but even the likes of Kia, Mitsubishi, Mazda and Toyota know that quality is something the Chinese brands are VERY close to nailing down for good. Some examples are, metaphorically, nipping at the heels of the best Korean and Japanese products, seemingly.
Time will tell.
CONCLUSION
Reliability really matters when you’re using a Jaecoo J7 every day, or your kids are using it to get to uni and so on. If this is going to be a vehicle you depend on for your life’s routine, then that’s an aspect we simply cannot answer with certainty yet.
The brand has only sent out its first few press releases and that’s all we have to go on. The fact they’ve set up a local head office in Sydney thus far doesn’t tell us much about what their vehicles are going to be like in the first three years of ownership.
The data we don’t have is the thousands of early adopters driving around in the J7s running the experiment, waiting for Jaecoo’s first opportunities to show us - you - what they’re capable of in terms of customer support, corporate culture and commercial stability.
This is the aspect of new car buying that the mainstream motoring media won’t talk about, because it jeopardises their relationships with the brands, with which they want to maintain cosied up to in order to access their press launches, advertising revenue and their test cars.
If you’re in need of a new hybrid midsize SUV, the Jaecoo J7 is a very exciting, very tempting new product that looks good both in the photos and on paper in a technical sense.
But if you can wait just one more year to see how the first adopters go, you’ll be able to make a much more informed decision. That is, of course, if you don’t want to go with that you know already about the Toyota RAV4, Kia Sportage or Hyundai Tucson hybrids, or the Mitsubishi Outlander and Eclipse Cross PHEVs.
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