Jaecoo's new flagship produces 255kW, but can do a claimed 90km on a single charge.
The Jaecoo J7 SHS is the first plug-in hybrid for the brand in South Africa, and I got to spend a week testing if it is as fuel-efficient as they claim.
I mean, telling the world that you can get 1200km on a 50-litre tank of fuel is some claim. So, what is the Jaecoo J7 SHS, and the claims, all about?
Plug and play
The SHS in the name stands for Super Hybrid System. And this means you have a car that is powered by a conventional internal-combustion engine and a high-output electric motor.
Under the bonnet sits a turbocharged 1.5-litre four-cylinder petrol engine that produces 105kW of power and 215 Nm of torque.
But you also have a 150kW/310Nm electric motor that provides plenty of immediate punch, and both feed into a shared single-speed Dedicated Hybrid Transmission (DHT).
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So, whilst the Jaecoo J7 SHS might look a lot like a normal J7, on offer is a full 255kW of power and 525Nm of torque. Now, this would normally mean performance at the expense of fuel consumption. But in this case, it doesn’t.
The 0-100 km/h time is brisk at 8.5 seconds, and the top speed is more than enough at an electronically limited 180 km/h. So, you have performance.
The 18.3-kWh battery housed beneath the floor offers you around 90km of pure electric driving, and this reduces fuel consumption dramatically. Even more so than claimed.
Best of EV and combustion worlds?
Simply put, like in my case, because I don’t travel miles upon miles each day for work, I didn’t use fuel. So, I could easily do well more than 1200km before I went near a petrol station.
All I had to do was make sure the car was charged every night. Just like any normal owner of a plug-in hybrid car would.
My wife, on the other hand, travels around a bit more, and she often finds herself with around 30% of battery left before the end of the day.
Then the car would engage the petrol engine to maintain the battery’s charge level. Doing this before putting the car on charge at home at night resulted in a fuel consumption of seven litres per 100km, and a range of around 700km.
I also told her to try the ‘Force Charge’ mode. This is where the car uses the engine once again to get the battery charged back up to 80% (or less, depending on what you set the number at) and keep it there.
But using a 1.5-litre turbocharged engine to drive a medium-sized SUV and charge a small 18.3-kWh battery is not a bright idea when fuel is over R20 a litre and electricity at home around R4 a kWh.
Obviously, if you also jump on the accelerator often and use all the combined fuel and battery power and treat your J7 SHS as a hot hatch and not so much a family SUV, then your expected consumption numbers will go out the window too.
To sum up, the Jaecoo J7 SHS has a bit of a split personality. If treated one way, the car will literally use no fuel, and then, when provoked or treated not quite like you should treat a plug-in hybrid, it will turn on you and use fuel like it’s from the Middle East. You choose correctly, you benefit.
Price
The Jaecoo J7 SHS is priced at R689 900, which includes the following:
- five-year/75 000km service plan;
- seven-year/200 000km warranty;
- 10-year/200 000km warranty on certain electric drive components’
- 10-year/one million km engine warranty
- 10-year / unlimited km power battery pack warranty for the first owner, which reverts to 10 years/200 000km for subsequent owners
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