Jaecoo 5 2026 review | Chinese brand's entry-level SUV

What is the Jaecoo 5?

You’ve probably heard of the Jaecoo brand before, because its been pulling up some serious trees since launching in the UK at the beginning of 2025, posting some very impressive sales numbers. However, while you might have heard of the brand by now, it's entirely possible that you still might not be afully familiar with it.

It’s one of a triumvirate of car brands - Jaecoo, Omoda and Chery - owned and operated by Chery International, a Chinese car manufacturer that’s been going since 1997, and that is currently China’s number one exporter of passenger cars. Jaecoo is put forward as the adventurous brand of the three, while Omoda is more about style and design, and Chery is a more mainstream, high-value offering.

Not that they don’t all have value on their side, mind. Take the Jaecoo 5 as an example. It’s a small-to-mid-size family SUV that blurs the size boundary between the B-segment (think Ford Puma) and C-segment (think Ford Kuga) at just under 4.4 metres long. It’s actually pretty much identical in size to a couple of ageing Volkswagen Group offerings in the form of the Seat Ateca and Skoda Karoq. It also comes stuffed to the gunwales with standard luxury kit, yet it’ll cost you about the same as a mid-range Vauxhall Corsa supermini. No wonder Jaecoo is getting people’s attention.

Stand next to it, and the Jaecoo 5 actually looks bigger than it really is due to bulbous design at either end, and the horizontal emphasis of its lines. The front end carries Jaecoo’s signature styling, complete with massive ‘waterfall grille’. If you choose the petrol version, that is. There’s also an all-electric version on offer, and this has a completely different front-end treatment, with a blanked-off grille for improved aerodynamics.

It’s the second model offered for sale in the UK by the Chinese brand, joining the Jaecoo 7, another family SUV that’s slightly larger.

How practical is it?

We’ve said already that the Jaecoo 5 looks like a bigger car than it actually is, and happily, Jaecoo has also managed to pull off a similar trick with the interior, giving a cabin that’s impressively roomy for a car with a relatively compact footprint. As you’d expect, there’s plenty of space up front, plus loads of storage spaces - 35 of them, so says Jaecoo - for stashing away odds and ends.

Those relegated to the rear seats won’t feel like second-class citizens, either, with headroom and legroom that’s easily generous enough to take very tall passengers in comfort. The width of the rear seats is such that three passengers will fit, but things might feel a little snug. The middle seat is a fraction narrower than those either side, too, although the floor in front of it is almost flat, giving good foot space.

The 480-litre boot isn’t as large as you get in some similarly sized SUVs such as the Ateca and Evoque, but it’s an entirely reasonable space, with good access and virtually no load lip thanks to a false boot floor. There’s quite a bit of storage underneath that false floor, too, which in electric versions, will prove very handy for storing your charging cable. Range-topping Luxury versions have a power tailgate.

All versions have 60/40 split-folding rear seats for extending the cargo area up to a figure of 1,180 litres. These aren’t as versatile as the 40/20/40 split found in some rivals, but the seatbacks do lie level with the boot floor when dropped, and lie almost flat, giving you an easy-to-load space. Overall, then, this may be a comparatively small SUV, but it’ll still have enough practicality to serve as a family car.

One thing we’ve been uniformly impressed with in cars we’ve encountered from Jaecoo, Omoda and Chery so far is the interior quality on display: they’ve all been much more plushly trimmed than expected, especially given the relatively small amount of money you pay.

In comparison, the Jaecoo 5 is less impressive. Most of the materials in your direct eyeline are fine, if not particularly lustrous, but there are some areas - the glovebox lid, the lower part of the centre console, and the lower portion of the doors - where you’ll find hard, scratchy-feeling plastics that undermine the feeling of quality somewhat. An Audi it most certainly isn’t.

That’s the case in both the trim levels, which get slightly different interior finishes. The entry-level Pure trim gets a hard-finish dashboard top and a strip of piano black trim across the dash, while the dashtop in the higher-end Luxury car has a softer-touch finish, while piano black trim also covers the centre console. In truth, the two dashtop finishes are both textured in a similar way and don’t look much different from each other as a result, so unless you regularly prod and stroke your dashboard - and why would you? - then you probably won’t notice much difference. And if anything, we probably prefer the more modest finish of the Pure’s centre console, because in the Luxury, the sheer amount of piano black trim on show looks a little chintzy. It'll be a magnet for fingerprints, too. That said, you will prefer the Luxury’s synthetic leather upholstery to the (still smart) dark cloth in the Pure.

You might notice a few other small things that might lead you to suspect that not all is quite as robust behind the scenes as you might like. The front doors sound decidedly tinny when you shut them, and when you put the rear wiper on, you can hear the electrical relay that controls its movement ticking away somewhere behind the dashboard. In the EV, we noticed a similar sound every time we pressed the brake pedal (it has by-wire brakes, so it stands to reason). These little inelegancies are things you simply don’t encounter in most mainstream rivals.

What’s it like to drive?

The Jaecoo 5 is available in two distinct forms, one with a 1.6-litre turbo petrol engine, and one with an all-electric powertrain (unlike the Jaecoo 7, it’s not offered as a PHEV). We’ll begin with the EV.

It has a front-mounted electric motor delivering 201bhp, making it capable of a 0-62mph sprint time of 7.7 seconds. It’s fed by a 61kWh LFP battery, giving an official WLTP combined range of 248 miles.

As it often does with an EV, the pickup feels faster than the official figure suggests. The car gets off the line very briskly indeed, and although the acceleration tails off a bit as you go faster, it always feels like there’s plentiful pace on tap.

The powertrain isn’t perfect, though. Regardless of which driving mode you select (you choose between Eco, Normal and Sport), the throttle response is rather lazy, both on and off the pedal, which robs the powertrain of a little bit of polish. You also choose between two modes for braking severity, and in both, the brakes feel a wee bit too eager and grabby (you actually feel very little difference between the modes, in truth), which erodes the dynamic polish a little further.

You’ll like the fact that this is a quiet car on the move, though. There's a bit of a whirr from the powertrain as you speed up and slow down, but it’s predictably quiet, while the car also comes as standard with a double glazed windscreen and front side windows, so wind noise is also very well contained. There’s a bit of road noise, but nothing out of the ordinary.

With the petrol version of the 5, the same applies for wind noise and road noise, but the powertrain is a very different kettle of fish indeed. It delivers 145bhp to the front wheels through a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox, giving the car an official 0-62mph time of 10.2 seconds. Again, that feels a little conservative, because it feels marginally quicker than that when you bury the accelerator pedal.

There’s a little more of an issue when you’re driving rather more calmly, though, which hopefully, you will be for the vast majority of the time. Like with the EV version, the throttle response is decidedly lazy, but here, that’s exacerbated by a decidedly dopey gearbox that often takes a couple of seconds to decide which gear it wants to select when you ask for even a moderate level of acceleration. The result is that when you’re either pulling away from the mark or picking up speed on the move, there’s a curiously long pause between you pressing the pedal and any proper forward momentum being served up.

The other slight issue is that when the gearbox finally does decide on a gear, it usually favours a low one, which sends the engine revs soaring a bit too easily a bit too often, causing a bit of a racket. The noise isn’t deafening, but it’s louder than it should be, and the strained, raspy quality of the noise isn’t all that pleasant.

This same engine is also used in the larger Jaecoo 7, and the Omoda 5 also has a version of this engine, albeit with a different output. In both cases, we’ve pilloried it in the past for similar issues, plus several others. Rest assured, this installation of the unit is nowhere near as bad, and the powertrain’s rather slovenly, clumsy character is something that you’ll probably learn to live with in time, and you’ll probably find ways to drive around it. It’s also true, however, that the powertrains of many rival SUVs go about their work with more finesse.

The Jaecoo 5’s handling is entirely fine. There’s always plenty of grip on tap, and the body doesn’t lean over too much in bends, even if you enter a corner a bit faster than you intended. Again, though, that last layer of polish is missing from the handling, and it’s the steering that’s responsible. It’s very responsive right off the straight-ahead, which sounds good at first, but it’s also inconsistently weighted (regardless of the driving mode), and that combination can make the car feel a little twitchy, and you may well find yourself making small corrections to your line in the middle of a corner.

The tidy body control comes courtesy of a rather firm suspension, and the low-speed ride is a little lumpy and unsettled as a result. Things flatten out a bit as you go faster, but it never completely settles down, meaning it’s not as comfortable as many rivals.

Technology, equipment and infotainment

All of the various Chery-owned brands take pride in combining their low prices with extremely generous standard equipment lists, and the Jaecoo 5 is no different. There are two trim levels - Pure and Luxury - and both are very well stocked.

Pure trim kicks things off with 18-inch alloy wheels, cloth upholstery, manual front-seat adjustment, a synthetic leather multifunction steering wheel, single-zone air-conditioning with rear vents, keyless entry and start, adaptive cruise control, a 540-degree camera system (it shows you a view underneath the car as well as all around it), and automatic halogen headlights with automatic high beam.

Luxury spec upgrades the headlights to LED items, and the air-conditioning to a dual-zone system, while you also get a panoramic sunroof with powered sunshade, a power tailgate, multicolour ambient lighting, a heated steering wheel, heated and ventilated front seats with power adjustment, and synthetic leather upholstery.

Both trim levels get the same basic infotainment system, which consists of an 8.8-inch digital driver’s display behind the steering wheel and a massive 13.2-inch portrait-orientated central touchscreen. Wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, are standard, as is voice control. The Pure has a six-speaker audio system, while the Luxury version gets an eight-speaker SONY sound system, plus wireless phone charging.

The system isn’t the most intuitive you’ll ever use, but it’s far from the worst we’ve encountered in that regard. Like many complex systems these days, some of the menus are very long and convoluted, and there’s very little visual differentiation between the numerous options on offer, so picking out the feature you’re looking for takes a bit of concentration, more than you’ll want to divert from the road when driving. However, at least there’s some semblance of logic to the way the various menus and submenus are arranged, so you do at least have a fighting chance of doing what you intended. Having said that, the way you switch between the native system and the smartphone integration could be more obvious.

As is becoming irritatingly commonplace these days, there are very few switches in the cabin, meaning even simple functions such as the air-conditioning have to be driven through the touchscreen. At least the air-con control graphic can be brought up quickly and easily by swiping upwards from the button of the screen, and then put away again by swiping down. It’s the opposite for the suite of advanced driver aids: swipe down from the top of the screen to bring up the menu, disable the ones you find annoying using the various icons, and swipe up again to return to the home screen.

Jaecoo 5 running costs

Arguably the biggest reason for buying the Jaecoo 5 is how little you pay for it, especially considering the generous amount of standard equipment you get for your money. Prices start at - as near as dammit - £24,500, which is very impressive.

For context, that’s about the same as what you’d pay for a mid-range Vauxhall Corsa supermini. Compare it with mainstream rivals such as the Seat Ateca and Nissan Qashqai, and both will cost you from £33,000 for an equivalently powered version, and that’ll be in entry-level trim, so you'll get nowhere near the kit that the Jaecoo gives you. And the similarly sized Range Rover Evoque that the Jaecoo 5’s styling is so clearly trying to ape? Well, the equivalently powered version in entry level trim will set you back around £45,000, so the difference there is huge. We’d add that all these cars are considerably more polished dynamically than the Jaecoo 5, but you’ll decide for yourself whether that’s worth the difference in cost.

It’s interesting to take a moment to frame the Jaecoo 5 among other products from the same stable. In general terms, the closely related Omoda 5 will cost you a few hundred quid less than the Jaecoo 5, while the larger Jaecoo 7 will cost you around five grand more. The Chery Tiggo 7, meanwhile, is only a few hundred quid more than the Jaecoo 5, but is the same size as the Jaecoo 7, so looks like the best value of the lot. Interestingly, we also found it to be a wee bit more polished to drive.

If you go for the combustion-engined car, the upgrade from Pure trim to Luxury costs £3,500. Prices for the EV version start at around £27,500 (the similarly sized Hyundai Kona Electric starts at around £35,000, by the way), while the trim upgrade on the E5 costs around £3,000.

The E5 also has the potential to be very affordable to run. Its 61kWh battery gives an official range of 248 miles, and a full charge from your average 7kW home wallbox charger will take less than 10 hours, and cost around £17 assuming that your domestic power is billed at the UK’s average rate. Charge your car overnight on discounted off-peak electricity, which you’d be frankly mad not to do, and it’ll cost half that, probably less. Either way, it’s much less than a tank of petrol or diesel. Use a public DC rapid charger, and you’ll likely pay three times the quoted figure because charging this way is far more expensive. It won’t be as quick as it might be, either, as the E5’s maximum DC charging rate is just 80kW, which is pretty slow in the scheme of things.

And the fuel economy of the petrol car? Well, that’s a bit of a grey area. An official WLTP figure wasn’t supplied in the press material we received, and despite scouring Jaecoo’s customer website, we couldn’t find a figure anywhere on there, either. When we asked the question of Jaecoo’s execs, we were initially told 34mpg, but that this was the result of an overly cautious homologation process, and that a recent retest had produced a figure of 41mpg, as communicated by colleagues in China. We’ll have to see which - if either - turns out to be closer to the truth. It’s interesting to note that the official figure of the Omoda 5 with the same engine stands much closer to the first figure than the second.

Jaecoo 5 reliability

The Jaecoo brand hasn’t existed in the UK for very long, and so historic reliability data on the firm’s cars simply doesn’t exist yet. That’s not to say that it’s some sort of on-the-fly start-up, though: parent company Chery has been building cars for decades, and is China’s largest exporter of passenger cars, so you’d hope it knows a thing or two by now about assembling components.

A big part of Jaecoo's appeal is that it offers a Kia-equalling seven-year, 100,000-mile warranty. This wasn't initially all that it seemed, though, because according to the Ts & Cs, an abnormally long list of components and systems quietly fell off the cover at three years or 40,000 miles, and many of these items were big-ticket ones that cost big bucks to fix if they go wrong. That could potentially have left customers with a big bill when they probably thought they were covered.

Some moaned at Jaecoo about this - us included - and to the firm's great credit, action has now been taken. As of August 2026, Jaecoo's warranty has now been amended so that most of the parts that were previously subject to warranty exceptions are now covered for the full advertised duration of the policy. And, the improvements in the cover also benefit buyers who bought their car before the changes to the warranty were made. We applaud Jaecoo for this, and the warranty offereing is now everything it should be.