GWM Haval Jolion Pro Review (2025-present)

What is the GWM Haval Jolion Pro?

Have you heard of GWM? If not, a quick primer: it’s one of the glut of Chinese car manufacturers now starting to export their cars to Britain, seeing a gap in the market for the budget-friendly, spacious cars that they offer.

At first, GWM’s only offering in the UK was the Ora Funky Cat, latterly renamed to the Ora 03. But at the start of 2025, GWM added a second model to its range: a medium-sized SUV called the Haval Jolion Pro.

Its somewhat generic styling sets it apart from the eye-catching Ora 03, but that’s because the Haval Jolion Pro is intended to appeal to more conservative family buyers, rather than young fashionistas. The idea is that it will take on budget-conscious rivals like the MG HS and Citroën C3 Aircross, as well as offering a bargain alternative to much pricier rivals like the Nissan Qashqai and Mazda CX-30.

How practical is it?

One of the biggest problems with the Haval Jolion Pro’s practicality becomes apparent the minute you open the boot: it’s tiny.

The problem is that the boot floor is extremely high, so there’s not much room between it and the roll-out luggage blind – barely enough, in fact, for a week’s shopping for a family. In fact, the 255 litres that’s on offer is quite a bit less than you’ll find in a Renault Clio, which is a much smaller car.

Things are better in the back seats, where there’s an almost excessive amount of leg room and plenty of head room too. The huge footwells mean there’s lots of room between the rear and front seats, which also results in plenty of space to fit your body into when doing up child seats.

Up front, the Haval Jolion Pro feels similarly roomy for passengers. There isn’t all that much space for odds and ends, though, and some odd decisions have been taken – for example, the passenger-side cupholder is too small to take much more than an espresso cup.

What’s it like to drive?

There’s only one version of the Haval Jolion Pro. It’s a full hybrid (HEV), though an unusual one, in that the 94bhp 1.5-litre turbo petrol engine that sits behind the grille plays second fiddle to a powerful electric motor that serves up 147bhp, the latter being fed by a 1.69kWh battery.

The idea is that the electric motor does most of the work, driving the front wheels through a two-speed gearbox, or with the petrol engine providing a back-up when full power is needed, and acting as a generator for the battery. GWM calls this its ‘Dedicated Hybrid Technology’ system, or DHT.

The result is a total maximum power output from the hybrid engine of 186bhp – a pretty healthy figure compared with most of its rivals. But because the Haval Jolion hybrid is quite a heavy car, performance figures are not exceptional, with the 0-62mph sprint taking nine seconds dead.

You’re never all that keen to attempt hard acceleration, either, because if you do, the engine spins noisily up to high revs, so that it can generate electricity to feed the battery while also powering the wheels.

Out on the road, the Haval Jolion Pro feels similarly underwhelming. The biggest problem with the driving experience is the way it rides bumps – it’s just too firm, crashing into ruts and shuddering through even fairly modest potholes. At speed on the motorway, you’d hope this firmness would dissipate, but sadly it doesn’t – and it’s joined by an annoying habit of wafting nauseatingly over crests.

And if you're hoping this might make it feel quite taut in corners, you're going to be disappointed. There’s a fair degree of slop if you try throwing the Haval Jolion Pro around at all, and it’s compounded by a complete lack of feel through the steering wheel, and a mushy throttle response.

Technology, equipment & infotainment

You can choose your Haval Jolion Pro hybrid in one of three trim levels, and all are pretty well equipped. Entry-level Premium models get keyless entry, alloy wheels, Bluetooth connectivity, wireless smartphone mirroring, adaptive cruise control, a 10.25-inch touchscreen, and a reversing camera, plus a host of safety features — seven airbags, automatic emergency braking, blind spot detection, lane departure warning, and so on.

Upgrading to the Lux version adds an electrically adjustable driver’s seat, heated front seats, a 360-degree camera, and LED headlights. The top-of-the-range Ultra, which can be had for less money even than the base models of some of its big-name rivals, gives you an electrically adjustable passenger seat, a panoramic sliding sunroof, a head-up display, and a ventilated driver’s seat.

This all sounds good, but there are a few surprising omissions from the spec list. For one thing, you don’t get satnav, and nor do you get a digital radio tuner; in other words, if you don’t have enough data to use your smartphone in the car, you’re stuck with an AM/FM radio, and that’s your lot.

The touchscreen itself can be teeth-itchingly frustrating to use, too; it’s slow to respond, replete with dated-looking graphics, and poorly translated (one menu refers to the windscreen wipers as ‘windscreen scrapers’).

To make matters worse, you have to resort to the touchscreen to control most of the car’s major functions, because GWM doesn’t really do physical buttons. So, for example, if you want to adjust the climate control, you have to poke the top corner of the screen, where the temperatures are displayed, which (eventually) brings up the climate control menu. Activating the heated seats, meanwhile, requires you to delve through four layers of menus and sub-menus.

And when the electronic safety features intervene – which they’re far too eager to do – they bring up pop-up boxes on the screen with odd messages and seemingly unrelated response buttons, which you have to press to dismiss them.

For example, spend too long fiddling with the touchscreen (which of course, you find yourself doing all too often), and the driver monitoring system will chide you with a message that says ‘Hey! Don’t stray!’; you then have to look at the touchscreen again(!) to dismiss the message by pressing, for some reason, either ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

GWM Haval Jolion Pro running costs

The obvious attraction of the Haval Jolion Pro for most people will undoubtedly be its price. Entry-level versions are astonishingly competitive, effectively giving you a new car for the same price you’d pay to buy many of its rivals as used cars.

There’s quite a big step up in price to the plusher variants, but even these look like a good deal, on paper at least, when compared with similarly-sized rivals. If price is all, then, the Haval Jolion Pro will be pretty tempting.

Trouble is, it won’t be all that cost-effective to run. Even the official fuel efficiency figures – which are usually pretty forgiving – aren’t all that competitive. The Haval Jolion Pro gets around 47mpg according to the WLTP fuel economy tests, but in the real world that will likely mean you’ll struggle to break 40mpg on a long run. By comparison with its hybrid rivals, that’s pretty poor.

GWM Haval Jolion Pro reliability

GWM is still a relatively new player on the UK market, and as a result, it hasn’t really been here long enough for us to have any useful reliability data on its products.

What we can tell you is that the Haval Jolion Pro is backed up by a five-year, unlimited mileage warranty, which should offer some peace of mind. This is on a par with what you’d get from Hyundai, but less than the warranties on offer from Kia, Suzuki and Toyota. It’s worth checking the small print, too, to check you’re satisfied with the level of cover later on in the warranty.