The 2025 Jaecoo J7 SHS looking extra good under some Canberra blossoms. Photo: James Coleman.
EVs are great. Around town. But as I’ve discovered, as soon as you dare step foot outside your home city and attempt a road trip, you’re paying through the nose at charging stations every few hundred kilometres.
A $40 top-up at Pheasant’s Nest between Sydney and Canberra, for instance, is not uncommon.
So while EV owners like to gloat about how much simpler and cheaper their cars are to run, a week with the new Jaecoo J7 plug-in hybrid has just passed for me. And I paid – wait for it – $0.
That includes driving from Sydney to Canberra, to and from work during the week, running errands on the weekend, then returning to Sydney.
Yep, about 1000 km all up, and zilch for electricity and zip for fuel. And there wasn’t even a nail-biting finish – I handed back the key with a combined 230 km of range remaining.
In about five years of reviewing new cars, this has never happened to me.
So it turns out Jaecoo’s boastful on-paper claims about this car – 100 km range from its battery and a combined range of 1200 km – are pretty much bang on.
The brand also offers a standard 1.6-litre turbo petrol model, but because a lot of people remain baffled by the term ‘plug-in hybrid’ and its acronym PHEV – like how exactly it’s different from a normal hybrid or a normal EV – Jaecoo has played a genius marketing card.
They’ve dubbed it the ‘Super Hybrid System’ (SHS). Because, as we know, everything sounds instantly better with ‘super’ in front of it.
I had ‘HEV’ mode engaged all week, when the 1.5-litre petrol engine keeps the battery topped up around the 20 km mark at all times. Apart from a distant roar I could pick out only if I craned my neck towards the windscreen like a water bird, the whole interplay was imperceptibly smooth too.
But before you rush out to buy a Jaecoo J7 SHS – with visions of all the mansions and golf courses you’ll buy with the fuel savings – there are some things you should know about it.
For starters, what the heck is a Jaecoo?
It’s an offshoot of Chinese brand Chery, alongside Omoda (which we’ve covered previously). Apparently, the name is a combination of the German word for hunter, “Jaeger”, and the English “cool”. But what effect this name has when added to dating app profiles remains unclear.
It has to be one of the best-looking Chinese cars we’ve seen. The square SUV profile and large grille suggest someone in the design team may have snuck into the Range Rover studio in the dead of night. Except the interior is better made, especially for the Jaecoo’s $47,990 driveaway price.
It’s spacious too. But there’s not a lot of sound deadening, so you’ll need your music close to max on the highway to overcome the tyre roar. The ride is also too harsh.
Then there’s the Tesla-like gear selector on the steering wheel. For starters, it lets you shift into Neutral while on the go – which can happen when you get your right and left mixed up and tap it, thinking it’s the indicator – so you pull up at the next intersection only to get nothing from the accelerator. Not enough pressure on the brake pedal and it also refuses to change into Drive or Reverse.
It’s a peppy thing – 0-100 km/h takes 8.5 seconds – but it also handles corners with about the same precision as when you try to pick up a toothpick with fingers that have just been rummaging through the chest freezer. It feels heavy and a bit clumsy.
Like most modern cars, you also need to stay on guard when passing cyclists or parked cars on the side of the road – the emergency lane-keeping assistance would much prefer you crash into them than dare cross the centre white line, and will snatch at the wheel. Then it flashes up a message, telling you to “focus on the road ahead”. You can turn all this off through the vast 14.8-inch touchscreen, but you’ll need to do it every time you start the car.
But this is a short-term sacrifice. Because after just a few years of Jaecoo J7 SHS ownership, you’ll have saved up enough to buy a Gulfstream.
2025 Jaecoo J7 SHS. Photo: James Coleman.
2025 Jaecoo J7 SHS Summit
- $47,990 driveaway
- 1.5-litre turbo petrol engine, 105 kW / 215 Nm; 18.3 kWh battery and electric motor, 150 kW / 310 Nm
- Automatic, front-wheel drive (FWD)
- 0-100 km/h in 8.5 seconds
- 1.0 litres per 100 km claimed fuel consumption
- 106 km electric range, 1200 combined range
- 5-star ANCAP safety rating
Thanks to Chery Motors Australia for providing this car for testing. Region has no commercial arrangement with Chery Motors Australia.
