Jaecoo 8 2026 review | Chinese brand's large luxury SUV flagship

What is the Jaecoo 8?

It’s not a brand that’s gently burrowed its way into your consciousness over decades like most established European and Japanese brands have, but the chances are that you’ll probably have heard of Jaecoo by now.

This Chinese SUV brand only launched in the UK at the beginning of 2025, yet its Jaecoo 7 mid-size SUV already finds itself at the business end of the list of the nation’s best-selling models, outperforming rivals and household names alike.

And how has this meteoric rise been achieved? Well, if you read our review of the Jaecoo 7, you’ll discover that the car itself isn’t very good in a variety of ways. However, it does look good (the phrase ‘Temu Range Rover’ has been bandied about by some), it comes packed with standard luxury kit, and it undercuts the established competition on price by a very considerable amount. And for a lot of British buyers, that’s evidently enough to make them sign on the dotted line.

The Jaecoo 8 is the brand’s latest salvo on the UK market, following the 7 and the smaller Jaecoo 5. It’s the firm’s biggest UK offering to date, measuring more than 4.8 metres in length, and it also plays the role of flagship for the brand. It comes in two distinct forms, a ‘Luxury’ version that has a seven-seater layout in the conventional way you expect, and a more luxurious (ironically, given the name) ‘Executive’ version with a six-seater layout, having two ‘Captain’s chairs’ in the middle row, rather than a conventional bench seat. All examples are powered by the same high-powered plug-in hybrid powertrain.

Direct competitors include PHEV versions of the Kia Sorento, Hyundai Santa Fe, and Volvo XC90. Rivals also include the Omoda 9 and Chery Tiggo 9, both from the Chery International group, of which Jaecoo itself is also a part. Other seven-seater SUV rivals include the Nissan X-Trail, Skoda Kodiaq and Volkswagen Tayron, although none of these can be had as a seven-seater PHEV.

When taking on these rivals, the Jaecoo 8 uses the same combination of good looks and high value that has worked wonders for the brand so far.

How practical is it?

The Jaecoo 8 comes in two distinct forms. There’s a more affordable variant called the Luxury, which comes with seven seats, and a more executive-focused version - called the Executive, as it happens - that swaps the middle row for two individual ‘captain’s chairs’, giving a total of six seats. They’re quite different propositions on the practicality front, so we’ll start by talking about the seven-seater Luxury, which Jaecoo expects to account for around 90% of sales.

For such a huge car (at 4820mm long, it sits between a Kia Sorento and a Hyundai Santa Fe for size), interior space is generally rather average. The middle row of seats slides backwards and forwards: set to the rearmost position of their runners, legroom in the middle row is fairly generous but not game-changing, while sliding the bench all the way forwards will have an adult’s knees pressing uncomfortably into the backrests of the front seats. Whatever the case, headroom is, again, adequate but not game-changing.

Pull a catch on top of the middle row’s backrest on the driver’s side (this mechanism is only provided on one side of the car), and the outer-middle chair slides and tilts forwards to allow access to the third row. This opens up just enough floor space to allow you to get a foot down, but the gap you have to climb through is still small and awkward, not helped by the combination of a high floor and a low ceiling, relatively speaking.

You’ll also notice this high-floor-low-ceiling combo when crammed into the third row, because headroom is very limited: even decidedly diminutive adults will feel contact between their scalp and the headlining, and tall ones will struggle to fit at all. With the middle bench slid all the way back, third-row legroom is insufficient for anyone with, well, legs, but this improves when those in the middle row slide themselves forward to donate some of the space available. If everyone plays nice, it is possible to find a happy medium where everyone fits, but nobody is going to feel particularly flush for space. In fairness, Jaecoo does call the car a 5+2 rather than a full seven-seater, but however it’s described, be aware that this is certainly more a car for running your pre-teen kid’s teammate home after Saturday morning football practice, rather than for ferrying your six-a-side team (plus one substitute) to your Wednesday night match.

Boot space is given at 200 litres with all seven seats in place, which is pretty small but enough for a couple of soft bags, or 738 litres within the third row folded away, and the space looks appropriately cavernous in real life. Those third-row seats lie at a slight angle, though, leaving a gentle slope to a portion of your boot floor, but there isn’t much of a lip to negotiate at the boot entrance, making it easier to load heavy items. However, with no underfloor storage in the boot and a petrol engine under the bonnet, your charging cable will most likely have to live in the boot, cluttering things up.

The middle row of seats is split 60/40, which isn’t as versatile as the 40/20/40 split in some cars, but they drop to leave a fairly impressive 2021 litres of loadspace.

With the six-seater Executive version, it’s a similar story with boot space, although obviously, the two individual captains chairs can’t be folded away for maximum cargo space. Likewise, it’s a similar story with third-row space in the six-seater (the captains’ chairs also slide back and forth, albeit with more limited travel), but access to the third row is even trickier here. There’s no trick mechanism to allow for easier entry past the middle-row seats, and while you can climb through between them, the gap is very narrow and that high-floor-low-ceiling combo we talked about earlier mean you’ll probably have to do so on your hands and knees, before somehow pivoting your posterior into one of the rearmost chairs. An easy undertaking, it is not.

Life is pretty sweet in those middle-row captain's chairs, which do reasonably well for space, as well as being heated, cooled, electrically adjustable, and able to give you a massage.

Up front, there’s electric adjustment for everything, including for reach and rake on the steering column, but you might wish for a greater range of movement in both directions. It’s a similar story with the driver’s seat: it’s rather high even in its lowest position, and while that delivers the lofty driving position that SUV drivers love, it hampers you forward vision because it’s more difficult to see past the massive rear-view mirror and the chunky piece of plastic (which houses the sensors for the driver assistance systems) on which it sits, which protrudes into the top-centre area of the windscreen.

That aside, your forward view isn’t too bad thanks to the slim windscreen pillars, but the opposite is true at the rear-end of the car, with massive rear pillars flanking a truly tiny rear window, which severely hampers your rearward view.

Quality-wise, everything looks really good initially, with manmade leather upholstery in both versions, a dashboard covering made from stitched manmade suede, and some dense-feeling interior panels. There’s quite a bit of piano black plastic dotted about the place, which looks a little chintzy, but it doesn’t damage the feeling of quality. What does is the plastic panel that runs horizontally across the dashboard that’s supposed to look like dark wood, and there’s more of the same trimming the centre console. It looks reasonably convincing at first, but a single brush of a finger gives away its true nature, and once you know it’s there, you can’t un-see it. The quality is undermined further by the rather lightweight feel of the front air vents and some of what few switches and knobs there are (more on that later), but overall, you shouldn’t have too much to complain about on quality.

What’s it like to drive?

As a flagship model, it’s fair to expect a certain amount of pomp to the way the Jaecoo 8 drives, and that certainly feels like what the company is aiming for. To that end, you get standard adaptive suspension that alters its behaviour according to which of the car’s numerous driving modes (many of which are off-roading-focused ones) you select, or you can also select from three dedicated suspension modes - Normal, Comfort and Sport - independently of the driving modes (although working out how to do this through the touchscreen really takes some doing, because it’s not very obvious).

Unfortunately, the effect isn’t awfully successful. Select Comfort mode, and the setup feels soft and wallowy, with lots of vertical movement. The intention is clearly to give the impression of a pillowy soft ride becoming of a flagship, but the reality is that speed bumps, large road imperfections and undulating roads have the car’s body bouncing around untidily. And all the while, despite the softness, there’s an underlying tremor to the ride that never goes away, even on seemingly quite smooth surfaces, so you’re jittering and jolting along at all speeds.

Normal mode doesn’t feel a whole lot different. The vertical movement is reined in by the tiniest of fractions, but the uncomfortable tremor remains largely unaffected.

In Sport mode, meanwhile, that underlying tremor becomes more marked, but not to a degree where it’s a whole lot worse. However, this mode does serve to tie down body movements a bit better, so it’s actually the best mode of the lot: it’s still not very comfortable, but at least the body doesn’t bounce around so much.

And whichever of the modes you select, corners and roundabouts result in lots of body lean, and a distinctly heavy and rather clumsy feel, even at fairly moderate speeds. It never feels unsafe or unstable, but neither is there much polish about the way the car changes direction. The weight of the steering is another thing that changes with the driving mode, but it always errs on the lighter side of life, and there’s very little feel, although at least it’s responsive and direct enough.

Rather more impressive is the Jaecoo 8’s plug-in hybrid powertrain, the only one offered. This pairs a turbocharged 1.5-litre petrol engine with a large 34.5kWh battery and no fewer than three electric motors: one electric drive motor on the front axle and two motors on the rear axle, one drive motor and one dedicated to regenerative braking. All of this runs through a hugely complicated variable-ratio transmission.

The cumulative effect is a total combined power output of 422bhp and a 0-62mph acceleration time of 5.8 seconds, not bad for a car weighing well over 2.2 tonnes. But the numbers are only half the story where hybrids are concerned because the nature of the power delivery is often rather unpleasant. Happily, that’s not the case with the Jaecoo 8.

With a juiced-up battery, the car defaults to electric power as much as it can, giving acceleration that’s strong, smooth and very quiet. The petrol engine chips in sporadically where more performance is needed, and it manages to blend in and out largely imperceptibly. Your performance always feels eager, and when you really floor the accelerator, the car feels downright fast, perhaps faster than a car of this colossal size needs to. Impressively, though, with the throttle pinned, the engine doesn’t buzz away noisily with sky-high revs like in many hybrids. Yes, it becomes audible, but the noise it makes remains distant and muted at all times. Wind- and road noise both become a little too prevalent at motorway speeds, but below that, both stay at entirely acceptable levels.

Okay, things aren’t perfect. The throttle response is of the typically lazy variety you seem to find in most Chinese cars, regardless of the driving mode you select, and the brake pedal doesn’t offer much feel and can be a fraction tricky to modulate. You can get around that second issue to an extent by dialling up the level of regenerative braking to the most severe of its three levels (again, provided you can work out how to do so on the touchscreen, which isn’t easy) but even this mode feels very gentle, and is far removed from a so-called ‘one-pedal’ experience. The brake regen’ in the middle mode, meanwhile, feels barely detectable, while the lightest mode feels fairly non-existent.

And yes, we did try the Jaecoo 8 off-road, and it’s fair to say that the car is capable of way more than any owner is ever likely to ask of it when off the beaten track. The instant and infinitely controllable torque of the electric motors is a real benefit on slopes and in slippery conditions, and there’s hill descent control and locking differentials should things become more hardcore. Land Rover and Jeep won’t be quaking it their (muddy) boots quite yet, but the 8 does have enough off-road ability to back up the rugged image that Jaecoo peddles.

Technology, equipment & infotainment

All Jaecoo 8s come with the same infotainment system, which brings together a pair of 12.3-inch screens mounted side-by-side on the dashboard, one behind the steering wheel to serve as your instrument panel, and other in the middle to take care of the vast majority of the car’s plentiful functionality. And it is the vast majority, because aside from a handful of controls on the centre console (a drive mode dial, a roller control for the stereo volume, a hazard light button, and some touch-sensitive icons for your heated front- and rear windows) and a few switches on the door trims (for the electric windows, electric mirrors and electric seats), there’s pretty much no other physical switchgear in the car.

The sheer amount that the system has to deal with means that it’s very complicated, with an intricate system of menus and submenus, meaning that it’s very easy to get lost when trying to find and operate even basic functions, and even when you know where you’re going, it feels like endless taps and swipes are needed to get you there. And yes, our perennial bugbear of having to operate the air-con system through the touchscreen applies to the Jaecoo 8, but at least you only need to swipe up from the bottom of the screen to bring up that menu.

You can also swipe down from the top to bring up a screen that allows you to disable some of the more annoying driver assistance systems on the car (you can find a list of all of them in our ‘Three things to know section, annoying or otherwise), many of which are over-sensitive and intensely irritating, but you can’t do all of the annoying ones from here, so you’ll find yourself having to seek out the driver assist menu to disable the remainder anyway. All of which distracts you from the road, ironically...

And thanks to safety legislation, all these systems are automatically reinstated every time you restart the car, meaning you’ll need to go through this rigmarole on every single journey.

The instrument screen isn’t ideal, either. Despite the screen itself being quite large, the fonts used on it are pretty small, with lots of wasted white space around them, so reading the info is harder than it should be. It’s surprising that there’s not more configurability, too: a button on the steering wheel allows you to toggle between different layouts, but there are only a handful of them, and it’s only a small cluster of stats on the right-hand side of the screen that changes, and the information contained within these different clusters is mostly pretty useless anyway.

Jaecoo - along with all the Chery group brands - takes an ‘everything as standard’ approach to its cars, and as the brand’s flagship, it’s no surprise that the 8 is absolutely heaving with luxury kit. The slightly cheaper Luxury version comes with goodies including 20-inch alloy wheels, LED exterior lighting with dynamic indicators, high-beam assist, multicolour ambient lighting, manmade leather upholstery, powered front seats with heating, ventilation and massaging function, power folding door mirrors, rain-sensing wipers, dual-zone climate control, powered windows, rear privacy glass, panoramic sunroof, keyless entry and start, front- and rear parking sensors, and 540-degree cameras. The infotainment setup includes DAB, Bluetooth, navigation, wireless phone charging, wifi hotspot, voice control, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and 14-speaker Sony audio.

As well as the six-seater layout in lieu of the Luxury’s seven-seater one, the Executive car also comes with electronic door opening (there’s a button rather than a pull catch), upgraded manmade leather upholstery, a faux-suede headliner, heated steering wheel, powered middle-row seats with heating, ventilation, and massage function.

Jaecoo 8 running costs

As usual, purchase price is one of the main headlines with the Jaecoo 8. The seven-seater Luxury model was launched with a list price of £45,500, while the six-seater Executive model checks in at £47,500.

Compared to its contemporaries from within the Chery group, it’s pretty much bang-on with the Omoda 9, and a little more than you’ll pay for the Chery Tiggo 9, although the Jaecoo’s stronger residual values mean that monthly payments will likely be very similar.

And true to form, compared to other rivals, the prices are a few grand lower than the Kia Sorento’s, a few more grand lower than the Hyundai Santa Fe’s, and many, many grand below the Volvo XC90’s. The Skoda Kodiaq can be had for similar money, but not in seven-seater PHEV form.

That plug-in hybrid powertrain allows the Jaecoo 8 an electric-only driving range of up to 83 miles according to official figures, which is one of the better figures on the market with such cars, and should allow you to undertake many of your journeys without using a drop of fuel.

Such a vast electric-only range usually gives a plug-in hybrid a ludicrously high official miles-per-gallon figure - usually up in the hundreds - that you could never even hope to achieve in real life (that’s because the official tests are unrealistically flattering to plug-in hybrids due to the way the tests work). However, Jaecoo’s quoted figure isn’t like that for some reason (we’re not quite sure why) and the 50.5mpg that the company claims sounds reasonably plausible.

As always with a PHEV, the fuel economy you actually end up getting will depend entirely on how you use the car. For best effect, keep your battery topped up and your journeys short enough to be done on EV power alone. And be aware that once the battery depletes, the car will probably become quite thirsty due to the weight of the battery.

The 34.5kWh battery takes five and a half hours to charge on a 7kW home wallbox charger, and a full-juice-up will cost around a tenner if you pay the UK’s national average rate for your domestic electricity, or much less if you charge overnight on a variable off-peak tariff.

The car accepts DC rapid charging at up to 70kW, which is very good for a PHEV, and a sufficiently powerful public charger can get you a 30% to 80% charge in 20 minutes, although this will cost you way more than charging at home.

Although the car’s pricing is very competitive, it’s still high enough to command the higher rate of VED road tax. So, from the second year of the car’s life to the sixth, you’ll be paying an additional £440 per year, on top of the £200 standard rate, for your now-metaphorical tax disc.

Jaecoo 8 reliability

The Jaecoo brand - along with all the other Chery group brands - hasn’t been around in the UK long enough to feature in any of our regular go-to reliability surveys, so how mechanically dependable its cars are remains rather unclear at present. However, Chery has sold over 15 million cars worldwide since being founded in 1997, so you’d hope the firm knows what it's doing by now when it comes to engineering and manufacturing motor cars. Encouragingly, Jaecoo offers a seven-year, 100,000-mile warranty as standard on its cars, which sounds very generous indeed, challenging some of the best arrangements out there in the motor industry. However, we need to advise a little caution here, because all is not as it seems with the warranty.

Delve into the Ts and Cs, and you’ll find that the cover on a list of certain items quietly expires after a mere three years or 40,000 miles. This in itself isn’t unusual, and similar things often happen with the warranty arrangements of other manufacturers. With Jaecoo’s cover, however, the list in question is considerably longer than usual, and there are some surprisingly big-ticket items on it (examples include shock absorbers, all rubber bushes and ball joints, brake calipers, timing belt, oil pump, water pump, fuel pump, fuel injectors, alternator, starter motor, air-con compressor, catalytic converter, the entire exhaust system, and the infotainment unit) that you really would expect to be covered for longer.