Aion V 2026 review | A smart Chinese EV with an eight-year warranty

What is the Aion V?

If your mind is boggled by the arrival of so many new names from China to the British new car market, well, we don’t really blame you. The influx of Chinese brands has been unrelenting – and now there’s one more to try and get used to.

The brand is Aion, and it’s part of GAC, or Guangzhou Automobile Group, which is now looking to carve out its own slice of success here in the UK. The Aion V is its opening gambit.

Its chunky looks do a good job of hiding its size; the V (that’s the letter V, by the way, not the Roman numeral five) is just over 4.6 metres long, which makes it almost exactly the same size as a Citroen e-C5 Aircross. On price, it also goes up against smaller electric SUVs like the Kia EV3, Skoda Elroq, Omoda E5 and MG S5 EV.

If you were to infer that that also means it offers a lot of space for the money, you’d be right. And together with the long warranty, that means it’s likely to pique the interest of families looking for an EV that majors on value and peace-of-mind.

How practical is it?

Let’s start in the boot, which is split into two by a false floor. Above this, you get 427 litres to play with, which isn’t all that much – for context, the MG S5 EV, Kia EV3 and Skoda Elroq offer 453, 460 and 470 litres of boot space respectively, while the Citroen e-C5 Aircross comes with a whopping 565 litres.

In this mode, however, the boot floor is at least flush with the load lip and the backs of the rear seats when folding down. And there’s an additional 73-litre storage cubby beneath the floor, which can be removed to give a total of 500 litres, which is much better. The downside, however, is that the odd-shaped lower boot floor will limit just how efficiently you can actually use this extra space.

The rear seats themselves can recline and fold down in the usual 60/40 format, but they don’t slide, and nor is there a ski hatch, which means if you want to carry longer loads, you’ve no choice but to lose one of the outer rear seats – and if you’ve got two kids, that means you might have to choose which of them you want to leave behind at Ikea.

Chunky external dimensions, then, but a relatively small boot. You might therefore be wondering where all the space has gone. Well, the answer is the passenger compartment. The rear bench, for example, boasts a simply vast amount of leg, head and shoulder room, and the flat floor means even the middle seat doesn’t feel cramped.

Large, square rear doors mean access is a doddle, meanwhile, which makes it easy to buckle children into child seats. And if you choose the Premium Pack, you get a fold-down tray table on the back of the passenger seat (mind you, the lack of a second on the driver’s seat will almost inevitably lead to arguments among the younger members of the family about who gets to use it).

Up front, the sense of space continues. There’s a floating centre console that tops off a huge cubby, and houses a wireless phone charger; meanwhile, there’s head- and legroom aplenty. Opt for the Premium Pack, meanwhile, and you also get a ‘CoolHotBox’ beneath the armrest. This 6.6-litre box, which operates can cool and even heat to anywhere between -15 and 50 degrees Celsius, so that it can keep ice cream frozen, keep cold drinks cool, or keep your service station Cornish pasty toasty until you’re ready to eat it.

On the downside, there’s no glovebox, which feels like an odd choice – and that means there’s nowhere to hide your valuables out of sight of prying eyes – unless you put them in the fridge, so to speak. You do get a couple of handy hooks if you want to carry shopping bags in the front passenger footwell, though, which is a neat idea.

A bigger problem is that it can be hard to get comfortable in the front seats of the Aion V. Where most seats offer a wide range of adjustment these days, some of the usual functions you’d find in most cars are absent.

For example, there’s no lumbar adjustment, which means those with lower back pain will find the seat back lacks support. And you can’t adjust the pitch of the seat squab either, so some people will find thigh support lacking – while others may feel there’s too much.

What’s it like to drive?

There’s only one powertrain available in the Aion V, and it consists of a 75kWh LFP battery, which supplies the energy to power a single 201bhp electric motor driving the front wheels. That’s enough for a 0-62mph time of 7.9 seconds, on the way to a top speed of 99mph, and an official range of 317 miles – though reckon on a real-world figure closer to around 270.

DC charging speeds of 180kW are possible, too, which means a 10-80 per cent charge can take as little as 24 minutes on a public charger that can match that top speed.

While none of those statistics is going to put the V at the top of the class, they’re all perfectly decent and reasonable for a car of this size and type.

But what’s the Aion V like from behind the wheel? Well, most of the time it’s OK, really – nothing more, nothing less. But there are some problems, and they’re mostly to do with the way the Aion V rides bumps.

It’s not firm per se, but there’s an irksome jiggliness at lower speeds that makes it feel rather unsettled, and never quite goes away.

What’s more, the ups and downs of a British country lane can really catch the V’s soft suspension out, causing it to bounce and pitch alarmingly. And because the soft suspension rebounds repeatedly, the car is often still recovering from the previous undulation by the time you hit the next one. In this way, several successive bumps can feed into each other, amplifying the bouncing sensation to the point you may even find yourself lifting out of your seat.

The steering, meanwhile, feels as though the other end of the column is resting in a vat of strawberry milkshake. Yes, the V goes where you point it – but any feedback as to what’s happening at the front end is sadly lacking.

None of this is a recipe for a car that’s much fun to drive – and even if you’re only trying to proceed at a moderate pace, the V can soon become deeply uncomfortable.

Happily, the smoother Tarmac on motorways means this sort of behaviour isn’t in evidence at higher speeds, and here, the lightness of the steering doesn’t prove to be too much of a hindrance either. Combined with the V’s low levels of wind and tyre noise, the result is a car that is at least a decent companion on longer cross-country schleps.

Technology, equipment & infotainment

No two ways about it: you get an awful lot of equipment with your Aion V. A panoramic glass roof, heated and ventilated front seats, heated outer rear seats, a heat pump, a powered boot lid, ambient lighting, wireless smartphone mirroring, a 360-degree surround-view parking camera system, adaptive cruise control, dual-zone climate control; these are just some of the toys that come as standard.

And while there’s only one model on offer, you can bump the specification up further by opting for the Premium Pack at extra cost; doing so gives you that second-row tray table and CoolHotBox, along with leather upholstery with a massage function in each front seat, and the option of cream or tan interior finishes.

Trouble is, Aion has taken the minimalist vibes of a Tesla interior to extremes, by omitting almost every button and switch. This means you have to use voice control or access functions via the huge central touchscreen, which is less than ideal. For example, turning on the lights requires several prods at the screen – distracting you from the road, just when heavy weather is descending.

That’s not the only usability compromise. The unmarked roller switches on the steering wheel take some getting used to – and because there are only so many functions they can control, there are things you can do in most cars that you simply can’t in an Aion V.

For example, cancelling and resuming the cruise control are impossible – you have to press the brake pedal gently to deactivate it completely, and then set your speed again each time, which is a faff. A handful of extra buttons – omitted, surely, in Aion’s quest for minimalism – would have solved issues like this.

And as with a Tesla, the hazard lights’ switch is up on the ceiling – not the first place you’d usually look in an emergency, which means finding it could add an extra degree of hassle to an already stressful situation.

Aion V running costs

You certainly get a lot of car for your money with the V. There’s very little else out there that offers quite so much space and equipment for the cash. The Citroen e-C5 Aircross comes close – but even though its top-spec Max model costs more, it doesn’t come with all the same toys. And while the Kia EV3 offers more range for the same sort of cash, it’s a mid-range GT-Line you have to plump for, which not only falls short on kit, but also on space.

Chinese rivals are more of a match on value for the Aion, though even here, the Omoda E5 isn’t as large or as roomy, despite costing almost as much. And while the MG S5 EV offers a similarly generous equipment list for the same sort of cash, it won’t go as far on a charge, and nor can you top up its battery as quickly.

All of which leads us to the conclusion that the Aion V is terrific value – and that’s before we’ve even considered Aion’s ‘Great 8’ package. This gives you a whopping eight-year, 100,000-mile warranty, but it doesn’t stop there, because you also get eight years’ worth of free servicing and MOT tests, as well as AA roadside assistance for eight years thrown in. As aftersales packages go, it’s easily the best out there.

And the Aion V should be reasonably affordable to keep charged up, too. An average of 3.7mi/kWh is claimed, and while that isn’t the best in the class, it’s certainly not the worst, either.

What’s more, that low list price means a low P11D value for company car drivers; it also means there’s no danger of straying over the £50,000 threshold that would trigger the luxury car tax surcharge for private owners, so an Aion V will only ever be taxed at the standard rate.

Aion V reliability

Unfortunately, it’s impossible for us to gauge the Aion V’s reliability at this stage, because the brand is so new to the UK. We can’t even draw any inferences from sister models’ records, or from the reputation of its parent company, GAC – there’s literally no way to tell how reliable the Aion V will be. It’s a complete unknown – and that’s worth knowing before you take the plunge.

Having said all that, that eight-year warranty should lend plenty of peace of mind. With the exception of those offered by Toyota and Suzuki, it’s the longest warranty in the industry.